America Underwater

Blog where Americans are sharing their stories about owing more on their house than their house is worth
America Underwater (http://america-underwater.tumblr.com/)

Rip Hopkins - Another Country

Rip Hopkins - Photography : Another Country

Expat interiors. Constant quest for something better.

Not at Home

Yesterday I made my first visit to the library Bauhaus Archive Berlin. Below is a list of expat related books encountered during my research into the importance of color in the manufacturing of consumer desire and political ideology in Cold War Berlin. I’m still fascinated by expatriates’ inclination towards nomadism. The following quote from Christopher Reed’s 1996 book Not at Home helps to clarify related history.

The notion of domesticity itself an invention of the modern age—the home, the family, privacy as comfort as opposed to the workplace—has been challenged and ridiculed by modern artists, architects and designers. From 1859, when Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life casts the modern painter as a man of the crowd who curses the hours he must spend indoors asleep when he could be out recording ‘the landscapes of the great city,’ domesticity became the anti-thesis to modernity.

Economic Downturn in Dortmund: Impact on Living Space

Above is a picture of vacant building Jack Stenner, Patrick Lemieux and I visited in Dortmund. Locals often describe it as haunted because occasional night lights from local squatters. Svenja Noltemeyer showed us the space and is part of an initiative to open industrial spaces for use by the communities including artists in Dortmund. More at http://uzdortmund.blogsport.de/

Please let me know if you hear of similar buildings in Berlin.

no-place.org

Jack Stenner at University of Florida and Patrick Lemieux at Duke University just finished work on Open House. At the center of the project is a foreclosed home in Gainesville, Florida that you can control remotely. I love the idea so I downloaded the software to interact with the house from Berlin, Germany, but the interface seems a little slow. Maybe I'm the one that is slow... Although I love the magic realism of the intro on the front page at no-place.org, especially considering recent conversations with Patrick about zombies, I wish that the interface was more streamlined and immediate without the need to download the application. Again, this may just be my learning curve, not issues with the project. More soon...

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask

Owen Mundy and I sent images this week to two international group shows at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K. and the Raccolte Frugone Museum in Genoa, Italy. We were invited to submit proposals that “could not be realized” to Sean Miller, who curated the exhibitions as part of his John Erickson Museum of Art project.

Our process involved first constructing a 3-dimensional model of the space. Owen did this using Google SketchUp.



Then we filled this template with our proposals. Two variations resulted.

JEMA.3333, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010



Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010



Exhibition card



Museum All-Over
June 4-August 29, 2010
John Erickson Museum of Art: Next Chapter and
Raccolte Frugone Museum
Genoa, Italy

Little Wonder
June 4-June 17, 2010
John Erickson Museum of Art: Next Chapter and
Golden Thread Gallery
Belfast, Northern Ireland
U.K.

Exact Coordinates of Home

"As far as one journey, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion—usually while he's lying in bed, starting at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodations in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you."

From Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I'm having trouble finding the original source, but worthy of a post.

art + blog = blogart?

When I started female-expat.org in 2004, my dream was to bring together the creative outpourings of women spread throughout the globe in one place online. The exhibition call below inspired me to not only have it exist online, but to have us collaboratively create a book that would be made available at lulu.com because although we love our computers as a way to explore content, many of us still enjoy having a hard bound book that we can hold in our hands while we take a break from technology.

Here's the quick and dirty directions to this project:
1) Scoll through the images
2) If any image relates to your own experience, write a poem or simple phrase in the one-line thought / quote from another offer, etc that relates.
3) Enter your poem, comment, quote, etc in the comment line for all to read (you can also email me your comments at jdietrick@gmail.com)
4) The best comment will be paired with that image for a book that will be made available online.
5) I'll buy and mail a copy of the book for those people whose writing is chosen.
6) The book will remain online for other female expats for years to come.

Thanks for participating!
Joelle
jdietrick@gmail.com


http://weblog.nmartproject.net/index.php?blog=8&title=call_for_entries_internet_based_art_java&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

a + b = ba ?
[art + blog = blogart?]

JavaMuseum - http://www.javamuseum.org
is starting its 2nd phase
by publishing on open call focussing on the question
whether blogs and/or blogging can be tools for creating a new type of net based art.
The launch of this new project in September 2007
is planned to be also the occasion for re-launching
JavaMuseum after a phase of re-structuring since 2005.

[More:]

.
JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art,
founded in 2000, realized between 2001 and 2005
18 show cases focussing on Internet based art in a global context,
including more than 350 artists from 40 countries.
In this way, JavaMuseum was able to show for the first time the dimension of Internet based art as a new and individual art genre, even if it is continously said to be dead.
.
For a + b = ba?, JavaMuseum is inviting
artists to submit such an art project
which is using the blogging technology.

One blog project only can be submitted.

Please use this form for submitting:

1. first name/family name, email address, URL homepage
2. short artist bio/CV
3. title of project, year of launch
4. URL of project
5. short project description ( English, no more than 300 words)
6. 2 screen shots (jpg, 800x600 px)

7. answer the questions of the interview
which can be found here --->
http://weblog.nmartproject.net/index.php?blog=11&cat=80

Please send the requested material via email to
info@javamuseum.org
subject line: a+b submission

Deadline 31 July 2007

Howard Zinsser

Another expat contacted me about her interest in my project and mentioned her interest in writing about her expat experiences. I recommended Howard Zinssers' How to Write Your Memoir. Since I loved his book On Writing Well, I'm guessing that I can recommend his book on memoirs. An interview with Zinsser about memoirs can be heard at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5340618.

Enjoy...

bomb shelters

Check out this video shot inside a house with objects flying back into space. http://www.spyfilms.com/FTP/METRIC/EMPTY(web).mov Related to my artwork's flying figures (think dislocation and new ideas about space), the video was meant to see. Make clear connections to Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film where objects explode at the end.



Wandering into my friend's bomb shelter also served as recent inspiration. The contrast between my floating figures and figures burrowing deep into the ground works well. The discovery also informs the show I'm curating this fall (Oct 1-Nov 11) at FSU's Museum of Fine Arts called Locating Secret Psychological Space. A post with info about the show is soon to follow.