Saturday, May 22, 2010

Mitsura Koga

„From Stones, serendipitous finds I picked up on the seashore I make work pieces. (...) Whenever I come across stones, I ask them what processes they went through. (...) I add special care to natural objects with the hope that the artificial process counterpoints the naturalness more. Vice versa the process seems to me to search for the position of human beings in nature.“

- Mitsuru Koga about these Sea Stone Works

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

want want want

You should probably write more postcards.

There was a brief story in the New Yorker about a man living in the city with his wife, who has regularly been receiving anonymous postcards since 2003. Hundreds of them. They are usually black and white photographs with some pun about the image, and his name is always misspelled - but in a different way each time. Creepy? Maybe. But especially since they appear to be utterly harmless, I can't help but applaud the writer of these postcards for his or her discipline and generosity.

Speaking of postcards, people used to put infrastructure on postcards, like the ones collected in this book Boring Postcards, which looks even more boring in German:
I think there is no such thing as a boring postcard. It's not like you have to look at it for a very long time. What would an exciting postcard be? One of bronzed butts lined up on the beach in matching day-glo thongs?

Obviously, they should have called the book Interesting Postcards, but tooting your own horn like that just doesn't fly. Look at the great things inside:
Highways are cool. It's too bad the author of this book didn't just come out and say he agrees. Another place where people appreciate highways is the Infrastructurist. An amateur's guide to exploring how homo sapiens make their habitats functional. And what they call these highway intersection-formations:
The Clover Leaf.
The Full Y.
The Spaghetti Bowl. (I'm a fan.)