me and ol’ bum lung just printed the most cool comic you ever seen and you want to have one of your own! buy one before we’re legally forced to stop selling them.
There was an artist named Gordon Matta-Clark born in NYC in 1943, who completed more than fifty artworks before he died untimely (age thirty-five) in 1978. Not one of GMC’s artworks is extant. To know what they were like you have to consult archival photographs or ask people who saw then. What GMC liked to do was cut things, usually big things. He split a house in half in New Jersey in 1974. He cut huge circular and boat-shaped holes in the walls, floors and ceilings of a Paris office block in 1977. He made a diagonal patterns of spherical cuts up through the floors, ceilings, and roof of a Chicago apartment complex in 1978. These structures were all slated for demolition before he found them and he got permission to intervene in and alter the process of ruin, which ran its course after he had finished. His best-known work is one for which he did not get permission. In 1975, prowling around the NYC waterfront, he found an abandoned pier that appealed to him. He broke into Pier 52 and spent two months making cuts twenty to thirty feet long and ten to eighteen inches thick in the corrugated steel of the wharf building. Pie-shaped, sickle-shaped and elliptical cuts. He also cut through the floor to expose the water below. He said various things about these cuts. He liked the way light passed alive cross the floor. He wondered how it would be to sit and watch this passage of light over the span of, say, a year. He wanted to make volume visible. He wanted to see the Hudson River sparkle inside. He spoke of “liberating” the compressed force of a building simply by making a hole. He hoped to “retranslate” the space into something he could “taste.” Soon enough the police found out about the retranslation going on at Pier 52. The site was confiscated, the building padlocked shut, charges brought against GMC, who left the country for a time. The work, which GMC had titled Day’s End, continued to be visited by people who broke in. It was soon demolished by the NYC Economic Development Agency. By the time of GMC’s death three years later, critics were calling Pier 52 a “radiant perilous cathedral” (Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, 131) and an example of a revolutionary new genre of “behavioural architecture” (Donald Wall, Arts Magazine [May 1976]: 74). So it goes with the prophets. You see them float and how they float and how can they.
GMC didn’t call his projects architecture. He invented a word: anarchitecture. This word has a nice etymology. If you take the prefix an- as an indefinite article, it implies his work is one of many possible architectures. If you take an- as a negation, his work is an antithesis or antidote to whatever architecture claims to be. “I just like to get in there and alter it,” he said. Each alteration was analytical. He did months of research before starting to cut a building; the cuts were based on exact knowledge of what he called “the semiotic system” of the building’s construction. His method was to cut away surface until he could see what was really inside. He made a building into an abstract of itself. Not so much to create beauty as to get information. He said his cuts were “probes.” He was probing for something he called “the thin edge.” This is from an interview of 1974: “… it was kind of the thin edge of what was being seen that interested me as much, if not more than, the views that were created” (Liza Bear, Avalanche [December 1974]: 36). Let’s pause to consider the etymology of the word etymology. It comes from etymos, an adjective meaning “real, true, actual” and logos, the basic noun for “story, account, analysis.” But etymos in turn has an etymology: probably derived from einai the verb “to be, to exist” (Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon). So an etymology can be thought to give the true meaning of a word because it has “is-ness” in it. The etymologist makes cuts that show Being as it floats inside things and how it floats and how can it.
Anne Carson· “Cassandra Float Can Original Cut.” Float (2016)
MIGHT POST A YOUTUBE VID OF ME PLAYING AROUND WITH IT ONCE I ACTUALLY GET IT!!!!!!!
I have one of these (the original, not the after dark model with delay) and I love it. It’s SUPER durable (seriously the toddler has not been gentle) and very functional. It can be a random noise/groove machine, or you can connect it to midi, turn off the random settings, and have a full-fledged synthesizer.
AWESOME OMG!!!!!!!!! GOD I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS SYNTHESIZER IT’S SO COOL…
A spooky lil lofi beat with the teenage engineering op-z driving the Blipblox synthesizer
MIGHT POST A YOUTUBE VID OF ME PLAYING AROUND WITH IT ONCE I ACTUALLY GET IT!!!!!!!
I have one of these (the original, not the after dark model with delay) and I love it. It’s SUPER durable (seriously the toddler has not been gentle) and very functional. It can be a random noise/groove machine, or you can connect it to midi, turn off the random settings, and have a full-fledged synthesizer.
Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 (1987) Dir. By Shinji Aramaki Animated By: Hideaki Anno & Kōji Akimoto
Legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno was only in his mid to late 20s and Kōji Akimoto being only 14 when he helped designed and animated Metal Skin Panic a mecha cyberpunk anime film.
