- Opto-fish -

opto-fish
Originally uploaded by I_N

The darkness makes me laconic. If you stare at this opto-fish long enough I think I could be like a cup of coffee, though I drink tea. I've stared at it and it seems to work, otherwise I would not have written this; If I had a flag mine would surly be like the Opto-fish.

Red Wing Blackbirds

red wing blackbirds
Originally uploaded by I_N

How do I know what kind of bird those black blurry shapes are? I walk the same area of land about every other day, and in the days preceding this shot, the trees were gradually filling up with a noisy flock of black birds, not starlings, not grackles, but red wing black birds. Usually they congregate in smaller groups and head south and spend the winter in big flocks. But this year has been warm, and the big flock seems to have been forming up here. When this image was shot the birds might
have been testing the waters, and small groups would break away and do a fly around. Today, November 22, I think they have all gone.

- God head 5 -

god head 5
Originally uploaded by I_N

This must be the god of short breath. He is chiseled out of sand stone, the dust of, is horrible to inhale. His eyes seem to be saying what the ?#$% are you doing, ya idget.

Indigo chip

Indigo chip
Originally uploaded by I_N

One bleak day, a day when it was raining and thirty five degree's; my computer helped me along with this notion. May be it was going to be an animation, maybe just an cyclical type of movement, or just some color to look at on a gray day. Oh wait I remember! It was a flow chart, illustrating pathways from the digital to our analog.

tomato nebula

tomato nebula
Originally uploaded by I_N

It was startled to see a cauldron of activity in it's immediate enclosure. Strings of more tangible things and area's were selective vision occurred - this was the sustenance of it. Back when it was a omniVisional environment, control was not hard, but now it took more manipulation and many occurrences were out of it's control. Now it could perceive it was not surrounded, and the landscape of time became apparent. Scale and rhythm is its obsession, a tool of now.

Head in a tree

Head in a tree
Originally uploaded by I_N

This could be a an Idea I would like to incorporate into one of my crawling trees. Good or bad I don't know - from the view point that all my
artistic excretions aren't even worth being labeled with the "kitsch" moniker - this idea might grow legs and take off (or toes).

T.V. knows best

humanoid ignoring tree
Originally uploaded by I_N

It's your duty to consume its product. Don't look away - do listen to its valuable message - Do Not infringe upon its right to be a good citizen in your home. Smile at all times there is nothing wrong.

Faces in the paint

Faces in the paint
Originally uploaded by | /\ /\/

If you flip this around you can see different faces staring out at you from the digital gloom.

Carl Sandburg's evil twin

Carl Sandburg
Originally uploaded by | /\ /\/

The number of views on this is low. Little wonder - what with the poo colored background, icky green complexion, irritated skin, and those black pit eyes make this guy an unfriendly. Well , I like him - that poor dense creature - he never was somebodies baby.

The Alerton Park Ugly

I was walking along the Sangamon river around Monticello, on the state of Illinois conservation land, and came upon this excessive amount of orange spray paint on the trees, marking the border with the University of Illinois Allerton park. I assume this is to warn the hunters not to cross into the park; If you were really so blind as to need all that orange paint maybe you shouldn't be out hunting; And those avid outdoors men should learn how to read a topo map so as not to cross the boundary, and never mind that there is already a old barbwire fence marking this line. I don't know which institution tagged the area( I will wager it was the U of I ) but if this sort of thing was done in any town, village, or city it would be called vandalism. This assault on the aesthetic quality of Allerton park has been going on for a decade or more, but has accelerated in the last four or five years. The trees are all heavily tagged to mark the hunting boundaries within the park, never mind this boundary runs along paths. The staff have been driving over the pathways while wet,creating large ruts. I don't know why this has been going on, but in the past twenty years I have been walking at Allerton, the last Three have seen the most ruts. In fact one soggy day I had to jump out of the way of a gator (an all terrain golf cart) with four or five young people barreling down the path leaving deep ruts. Why couldn't they walk? That gator was probably hauling its cargo of students to drop off their next experiment or field study. Equipment to be left and forgotten about after the student has moved on. On down the path a few culverts had been washed out and a misdirected effort at replacing them had resulted in some, highly erodible- poorly designed -stream crossings, made out of rip rap and plastic tile. UGLY!



In other places the chain link fence blocking the bridge exudes that industrial park feel. And that fence around the gardens has me looking for German guard towers, Steve Mcqueen (ala The Great Escape) or William Holden ( Stalag 17). The spiral stairway that led from the house to an old concrete room and bench ( possibly was the best feng shui in the park) was taken out, those spirits will be angry. And the final straw, somebody let the old old old hot house jade plant die.
The University of Illinois has an art department, a landscape architecture department, a horticulture department, and the Japan house; The institution has the talent resources but does not use them.
As the minster of the Department of Aesthetic Justice, I pronounce ye verging toward Ugly.

Oxymoron

Scoop For Your Life

 After a heavy snow I noticed more than a few people trying to walk on the un-scooped side walks. They weren't on a leisurely stroll,
they were trying to get somewhere, probably a bus stop. In many cases the sidewalk had been piled up with snow from a parking lot or a road, and the only way through was to walk on a busy snow packed thoroughfare. Where I live, property owners are supposed to clear the side walks, almost none do in a timely fashion, and the local government clears the road way. This is discriminatory, it's the only way it can be describe. Many of the people walking are poor, many are old and many are young. Not scooping the sidewalk is socialopathic symptom that will only hasten our use of a car when we need not.

In the rural areas there is a deficit of reserved walkable pathways. In Britain there is a right to trespass, that is there are trails that lead often from town to town, that have been used for a very long time. People have asserted their right to walk these trails over and over again, and have gone to court to keep their right to trespass open, the enclosure acts is what you will have to read about if you what to learn more. In this country it was and is a religious orthodoxy of property rights that have shape our land. (Set aside the issue of a slave as property, even though that is gigantic in historically figuring our property rules) Now this is speculation but I would say that this idea of property developed as a reaction to the Native American assertion of their rights to pass freely on the land. You see the land scape wasn't just as free and untrammeled as we have always been led to believe. There were native pathways all over the place. In fact: (not speculation) - if you pay close attention there are pathways in the Rockies that have been converted to hiking paths, and are named accordingly. Where there was no land set aside, the trails were blocked with fencing or made into road ways. One of the ways to keep the native from migrating back in to your land was to make trespassing illegal. That would effectively put who ever wanted to travel, on a government controlled highway system. So the process of segregating the Native Americans led to a extreme shortage of public pathways, and as our cities became more Sub-urban they adopted this sort of transportation frame work.
again all speculation.

I went to south Florida once, and you can inversely read the age of the development by how many lanes the main road has. That could be to simplistic, but in and around the newer gated communities there are roads that are 10 lanes across. Being from a small Midwestern town, this blew my mind. I kept repeating, “look at that! Eight lanes. Oh my gosh 12 lanes. Oh no, just 11, or wait - I can't figure out.” They need all these lanes because there is only one way in and one way out of a gated community, (there could be more I only saw one) traffic doesn't have many ways to flow but one. Also I will wager that in a few years or months, maybe two or more of these gated communities will get in a war and mount cannons on their walls and put bunkers in key positions. That would lead to even more snarled traffic and eventually somebody would come up with the idea that maybe they could build a office or a shop close to there house, so that somebody would never have to leave the gated community and the ten lane roads could be used for landing strips for a local air force. But seriously, everything is so spread out, and dependent on a large infrastructure to support driving like a maniac from your gated community to the restaurant to gas station to work to the restaurant to the school to the gas station to the enemy gated community to the gas station, that eventually the tax burden will become so heavy that the local economy won't be able to support it. It seems they are all incredibly wealthy down there so maybe they could. In most environs that will not be the case, and if development like that is continued, there will be a point of no return and an unsustainable debt load will keep economic activity suppressed. We could be in that situation now, I don't know


So scoop your side walk for the survival of the Republic.