This is the 14th comic in the ongoing series I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf. More from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.
Appraisal
A new Frame by Frame comic with Hannes Pasqualini
Categories
Playing slots
Deconstructionism: everything is a text
A nearby library:
End of Weekend
Scratch Pad: Earth, Earbuds, Reading
From the past week
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Picked up my Earth ticket on Sunday evening when I happened to walk by the Chapel on Mission. Can’t remember the last time I bought a physical ticket at a venue days in advance of a show.
▰ Changing from one brand of earbuds to another means learning a whole new range of controls and context-specific sounds, and getting used to a different set of options, and to the unique tonality of the sonic artifacts resulting from digital processing.
▰ I probably should have turned on the lights in the kitchen before preparing granola this morning. If it’s possible to overdose on nutmeg, I’ll know shortly.
▰ Afternoon trio for dryer, bathroom fan, and passing bus.
▰ Read a lot this week (Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo), but only finished reading one book, a graphic novel titled The Phantom Scientist by Robin Cousin, who tells a story at once scientific and elliptical, with strong echoes of Chris Reynolds and Jason Shiga, not to mention Don DeLillo. I really dug it, but if someone can explain its ending to me as being anything more than artfully oblique, I’d be thankful.
From Little Things
Big things thrum
The installation artist Zimoun specialized in large-scale exhibits where substantial batteries of physical objects combine to make a lot out of a little, whether it’s ping pong balls, or springs, or cardboard boxes, or piano strings, or polyethylene tanks, or DC motors, or cotton balls — or, generally, two or more of those in combination. Experienced in person, the works take on a semi-lifelike, if not necessarily sentient, quality — that is, they are “generative” (in the sense that predates the near wholesale accession of that term by commercialized artificial intelligence). By contrast, Zimoun documents these with short videos that are, if you’ve seen the work close up, akin to a postcard representing a cross-country trip, not so much shorthand or short shrift as a considered encapsulation. Among his latest, from this still fairly new year, is “24 prepared dc-motors, 24 metal barrels, 265m piano strings” (the pieces usually have titles determined by their constituent parts), which summons up an orchestral drone, as the vibrating strings cause deep emanations from the metal drums.