mama project twenty-twelve.

And in a complete one-eighty from last year's MaMa Project visual identity, and even from my own graphic style, I present to you my latest — and possibly most laborious — poster design.

I was originally very resistant to the idea of deviating from my typically Illustrator-heavy and more or less minimalist style because I am trying to put together a portfolio that shows some sort of consistency between my works, but in hindsight, this probably gives me points in terms of breadth. Or at least I hope it does. There are still a few minor things that are bothering me that could be improved, but after ten (or more?) hours of nonstop painting and blending on my tablet, I don't think I can touch this again for a while — and I definitely shouldn't. I've got architecture projects to birth!

All that design process stuff being said, if you happen to be in New York City / Upper West Side next weekend, you should definitely check out Unearthed! The conceptual basis of this dance work is formed on the idea of humans embracing their primitive, animalistic nature and breaking free of the restrictive daily grind that winds us all up to be machines. (The choreographer, Marie Janicek, puts it much more eloquently in the event description). Tickets are $5 for Columbia students, $10 for the general public, and can be purchased here.

experiments in blind photography.

People used to love my Corbusier-inspired spectacles, but they seem to REALLY dig my new frames. So I can expect at least one person to unceremoniously pull them off my face at the bar without even asking, suspecting them to be the latest hipster accessory, and get their greasy fingerprints all over my vision. Yes, I actually cannot see anything more than two inches away from my face, like I already told you. And if this is your way of flirting with me, it's not cute, and it's definitely not original. I get really on edge when I cannot see what's going on, but — rant over.

I remember the day when I first discovered I had to get glasses —four eyes? social suicide! — I was one devastated nine-year-old. When I put my nerdy, wire frame Harry Potter spectacles on for the first time, I could not believe that this is how people actually saw things. I had been ignorantly content in my world, where everything was soft around the edges. Twelve years later (and with a much deteriorated vision), I can say with certainty that a world with clearly defined lines and colors beats the otherwise impressionistic landscape I live in, but I do miss one thing: the way lights glowed and flickered.

So over Winter Break, I took my glasses off, put my camera on manual focus, and shot the Christmas lights twinkling around our house. I discovered that even with my impaired vision, I could gauge the focus of the lens and still take clear, in-focus shots (Cool, right!? Humans are really quite adaptable creatures). But what I wanted to capture was how I really saw:

But, of course, I also had to play with the lights, too.

well-done.

I was really impressed that I had heard all of the songs in this mash-up — I'm usually out of the loop when it comes to popular music, but now there's Spotify!

latest&greatest.

I would like to begin by apologizing to anyone out there who happens to actually read / follow my blog for my lengthy hiatus. There comes a point where one has to make the choice between living life and blogging about it — and I suppose, when it comes down to it, you can't blog about it if you haven't been living it.

This semester has been, for lack of a better word, fruitful. A bit boring and slow at times, but never bad (not really the description you would expect for someone's senior year of college). From it has developed my current tagline: I'm a full-time student with seven part-time jobs. It sounds awful, but it's what happens when you actually take advantage of every opportunity that interests you (read: I really need some dollah billz to my wallet). Unfortunately, though, the things I do create minimal income. For example, my favorite piece of graphic design work that I have done so far:

featured!

SPECTRUM, the Columbia Spectator's blog, did a feature on student bloggers last week — and simplysevan was included [although this is old news at this point, I thought I would still share since it was exciting]! And thanks, Adrienne, for tipping the author. Also, while we're on the subject of SPECTRUM and belated annoucements, my poster for the homecoming game fair made an appearance on the blog last Fall [as did Yanyi's Genderfuck poster!].

flashback to perceptions studio.

I just posted on Design-Calendar about Madeline Shwartzman's book launch last week. I was bartending/photographing at both launches and had a spectacular time! Not to mention that the book is pretty mind-blowingly amazing, so you all should definitely check it out.

Here's a re-post of the original publication:

On almost any given night in Chelsea you can stumble upon a number of gallery show openings, featuring everything and everyone from the ultra-familiar Warhol to a contemporary conceptual photographer you’ve probably never heard of. But what might make discovering a hidden gem in the art world is to find a party to go along with it — now that’s the icing on the cake.

Although it wasn’t quite by chance that we found ourselves at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center last Thursday, the night was nevertheless quintessentially New York. The atelier was teeming for the U.S. launch of Madeline Schwartzman’s new book, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception. The book is the first to survey and present over 100 projects by artists, architects and technologists that explore the relationship between design and perception at the intimate scale of the human body. Pages from the book were projected on the back wall of the atelier space, revealing a sampling of the fascinating images it contains: Haus-Rucker-Co’s Mind Expander (1967), Diller + Scofidio’s Braincoat (2002), and Hyungkoo Lee’s The Objectuals series (2007) to name a few. To the right, what looked like a human-sized sandwich bag hung from the ceiling. We later discovered that it was much more than that when Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf took off his shirt and shoes, and stepped in between the two layers of PVC. Within a minute, he was vacuum-packed between the two transparent layers, suspended in mid-air. Malstaf performed Shrink (1995) twice for the evening’s audience, getting a loud round of applause as he stepped out of the plastic, still breathing and completely unphased by the experience.

When the lights went off an hour after the launch party was scheduled to end, there were still a few stragglers unwilling for the night to come to an end.

good eats.

Dinner Edition
Lemon Chicken with Red Pepper

Pans make cooking incredibly easy. You can make fajitas in a pan, or toast, or marsala sauce, even stew (made a really good one using a recipe I found in a magazine but didn't document it — I will next time for sure)! Recently, I decided to make lemon chicken with red pepper. I had about a pound of boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the freezer that needed to be used before going bad, a couple of lemons my family had mailed me in a care package (I know, weird, but they were off the tree in our garden!), and and as always, a lot of spices on the ready. All I had to do was buy a red pepper, which was meant to be the "healthy" vegetable part the meal. Good thing I only used a quarter of it...

1. the marinade : I squeezed four small lemons (which turned out to be way too many; I would try three next time), then added two to three crushed garlic cloves, fresh ground pepper and rosemary to taste — all in a bowl. I then added the chicken (already defrosting through the morning) and let it marinate for twenty minutes in the refrigerator. In the meantime, I diced a quarter of a red pepper.

2. get cooking! : I heated up the pan, added olive oil, and grilled the peppers for about three minutes (well, I don't actually know, I'm making that number up). Then I added the chicken and grilled each side until it looked white all the way through. Finally, I added the marinade, put a lid/cover on the pan, and let it simmer on medium heat for at least ten minutes. Simmering the chicken in the marinade is important because it guarantees tenderness.

3. presentation : You don't have to go to a fancy restaurant to have your food served in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. I lined up the chicken pieces on my plate, poured the remainder of the marinade from the pan onto them (although if you're really picky, I would suggest not using a blue plate; blue plate plus yellow marinade makes for a greenish tinge), then spooned the peppers on top. Voilà! And yes, I did eat it all by myself; my roommates had already had dinner and I'm basically carnivorous.

...

"The history of the modern movement has been one of a long-standing flirtation with technology; but the marriage never seems to have consummated. The emphasis of the discipline for some time has lain with the visual manipulation of the formal and symbolic elements of building. One feels that invisibility of structural function has been intuitively recognized, but increasingly sidetracked aesthetically into the creation of spatial effects: the ambiguity of inside/outside in the glass wall, the dematerialization through the use of glass at corners (as in the Gropius Faguswerke), the reflections in the great curtain walls (like the United Nations Building), the feeling of lightness given to massive concrete structure by mounting the whole structure on pilotis. This has given us the very great architecture whose individual works are superbly poetic evocations of certain aspects of machine technology. But such emphasis may in fact operate negatively because we so manifestly require real technological solutions to minimal shelter needs." -- John McHale, R. Buckminster Fuller, New York 1962


Not much has changed since this book was published. In my classes, the vocabulary is still the same; the obsession with the abstract, with spatial deconstruction has not passed. And it is all superbly poetic, true. But the rational and effective design philosophy of Buckminster Fuller -- call it technical, if you will -- is literally nonexistent in my undergraduate curriculum. Is it wise for the liberal arts to focus so much on how to think that it completely eliminates the how to do? The "art and science of generalized and anticipatory design competence" (Fuller, emphasis added) should not be disregarded. Architecture can be poetic, but it should also be polemic. It should address basic human needs, like housing, in the form of comprehensively designed solutions. Attempts at such solutions do exist today in the form of Earthship Biotecture, for instance, but unless such practices are widely adopted and aggressively applied*, scattered sustainable houses make absolutely no dent in the international lack of housing stock.

In 1927, Fuller predicted that 2,000,000,000 (that's two billion) new homes would be required in the world in the next eighty years (by 2007). He was not far off. In 2008, an estimated one billion people lived in urban slums, a number that is expected to double by 2030 due to unprecedented worldwide population growth almost solely concentrated in urban centers. Moreover, that number does not include the number of people who are homeless or living in substandard housing that is not part of a recognized slum. Whether Fuller's plans are ever implemented or not, can a solution truly exist for a problem as prevalent as this. Perhaps, with ingenuous design and socioeconomic policy reform... but for now, too many young architects (but not all, not all) are preoccupied with creating spatial wonderlands that are outside life's universal context.







*I do know that Michael Reynolds and Buckminster Fuller have very different ideas about how sustainable housing should be built -- local mobilization sourcing materials from around the site (manual labour and garbage) versus energy-efficient prefabrication using industrial materials (machinery and technology) -- but that is a discussion for another day.

good eats.

Breakfast Edition

My favorite meal of the day, without a doubt, is breakfast. And I don't mean the bowl of cereal I typically inhale before rushing off to work. When done properly, breakfast -- or brunch -- really gets the day started right. Eating a nice breakfast [that I make myself] makes me feel accomplished, and instead of leaving the house feeling bitter about having woken up so early, I leave the house ready to take on whatever comes my way. So sleep a little earlier to wake up a little earlier and treat yourself to a nice omelette or croissants with fruit -- I recommend from experience, brunch today was phenomenal.

1. Eggs over-easy, some citrus, half an avocado, and a glass of nice, cold milk.

2. Trader Joe's Crescent Rolls. Preheat oven to 350º and bake for 12 - 15 minutes.

good eats.

Lunch/Dinner Edition

Pasta is probably the most versatile, low-budget ingredient a college student can have in the kitchen. Not only is there a plethora of pasta recipes available online, you can probably toss in just about anything in with your pasta to make it a meal. My favorite type of pasta is fusilli; it's aesthetically pleasing and fills you up nicely! These set of photos show solutions to the no sauce problem (the second was more successful than the first). Perhaps I am the only one who thinks pasta is good even without sauce... but too much plain pasta just makes you feel awful by the end of it.

1. Pasta fusilli with tomato - carrot - olive "sauce" seasoned with oregano, salt&pepper in tuscan-seasoned olive oil I found in the kitchen (I had a jar of marinara that wouldn't open so I had to improvise), garnished with chives. I boiled the carrots in the same water that I used to boil the pasta to make them soft, then pan-fried them along with the tomatoes and olives in a pan. It would have been better if I did have some actual sauce...

2. Pasta fusilli seasoned with oregano, salt&pepper and lemon juice in olive oil with avocado, tomato and mozzarella cheese on the side.