An exercise in live-writing

I met with a group of textile students at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Sitting around a small table, I read from a selection of finished and unfinished online pieces. After the talk, we did a live-writing exercise. I dumped several bags of printed words on the floor and placed two sets of alphabet stamps…

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Buckminster Fuller
Thank You

 “Don’t fight forces, use them.” A pragmatic utopianist – from geodesic domes to automobiles, to globes, Fuller was a universal talent with a fantastically quirky mind. Thanks for observing that life requires attention to design, even if we want to live it simply.

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Michel de Certeau
Thank You

Michel de Certeau, the heroic lies in the unnoticed… a gentle scholar, wonderful generalist (as opposed to a specialist) and a Jesuit priest.  His book, The Practice of Everyday Life, has influenced my work as an artist and teacher in innumerable ways. My favourite quote: “Sly as a fox and twice as quick: there are countless ways…

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Allucquere Rosanne Stone aka Sandy Stone
Thank You

Allucquere Rosanne Stone aka Sandy Stone: border-bender on numerous fronts – technologies, bodies, communication, identity, gender, art, theory, fact and fiction.  Where preconceptions and conventions rule, Stone is there testing and stretching the boundaries.  Her book, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, is a work I return to again and…

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Magpie
Thank You

Magpie, a bird that often sits outside my window. One is for sorrow, two for mirth, Three for a wedding, four for a birth.  Silver wrappers, shiney plastic, twigs and string, you’re an opportunist and true alchemist. Thanks for extoling the virtues of relentless scavenging and believing that there are treasures to be found amongst the detritus.

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Nettime
Thank You

The Nettime mailing list was always a bit of a thorn in my side due to the prevalence if not dominance of male voices. That said, I’ve met people through the list that I would have never encountered otherwise. In the mid-nineties, Nettime was my primer to net(worked)-culture, a school of hard knocks. Through it,…

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Lygia Clark
Thank You

Soft, air, stone, hands embrace that space in between.  Thanks for highlighting the intensity of the senses, and all that’s beyond words.

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Spalding Gray
Thank You

Spalding Gray, humorist, actor, ragingly manic troubadour.  Your critical wit is sorely missed in these glib-tongued times of endless fear mongering.  Although they found you in the East River, I will always imagine you’re still swimming to Cambodia. Thanks for endlessly monologuing. 

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