collage: books and cybernetics

Two quick things I knocked together. Sometimes you just run across something that makes you want to cut it out and keep it: one was a picture of piles and piles of new books and another was a few lines of text that were just too weird to forget.

Both collages in a Moleskine Large Squared Notebook.

Stamp of Observant Owl, from Ink Wit

Apparently a performance artist I won't name has had a cybernetic ear affixed to his arm. The text reads: 'The ear cannot currently hear; however, the artist now plans to use his own stem cells to grow an external ear lobe before implanting a Wi-Fi enabled microphone which will be permanently activated so that people all over the world will be able to listen live.'

But to what, I wonder?

Esther Quek is my fucking hero.

Esther Quek.

Quote from here.

we are tradition: kalinga woman

In the Cordillera Mountains in the Philippines, there are people called the Igorot, certain tribes of which traditionally wear tattoos all over their body. The art of this style of tattoo is dying; a woman called Whang Od, who lives in the tiny mountain village of Buscalan, is the last surviving fully-trained tattoo artist.

I learned a lot making this piece. I'm not quite where I really want to be with my art right now (to totally mangle a quote from Frank Herbert, the only true art of mankind is the art of discontent*), so I was happy to go back to something that required a lot of patience and craft. It was a slow start, and I made quite a few mistakes at first, but I got into 'the zone' after that.

One thing I did learn is that if you make a line with a Faber-Castell coloured brush pen and then immediately go over it with a Derwent Inktense watercolour pencil, you get a pretty amazing blending effect with a lot of richness and depth. But those pens dry really quickly, so you have to work fast and at the same time be patient: lay down a few lines, blend in, lay down a few lines, blend in.

I did the tattoos the same way I imagined them being done in real life: I rendered the bare skin first, then drew the tattoos in thickly with the coloured pencil, then went over it with the ink pen to make it solid and permanent.

The story came last. I got most of the information (as well as the photo reference) from travel blogs: here, and here, and here.

*the original quote goes like this (minus narration and contextual speech tics):
'Mankind has only one science.' 'And what is that?' 'The science of discontent.'

bright minds, big city

From Wired Magazine:
Are People Nicer In Cities?

Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and their team of theoretical physicists may have found the root of the reason cities exist, uncovering the socioeconomic benefits that more than compensate for the high rents and vermin infestations.

“Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them from a city of
fifty thousand to a city of six million, then all of a sudden they’re going to
do three times more of everything we can measure. It doesn’t matter where the
city is or which cities you’re talking about.”

I'm not convinced that you can reasonably quantify the degree of intelligence people gain when living in a city. There will be people who shine in a population of a few hundred or thousand, and there are people who could live in the best city in the world and still be narrow-minded idiots.

But there's still something that opens up in your head when you see just how expansive and diverse the world can be, and one of the best places for that is a top-class hub city, preferably with as much cultural diversity as possible. It may not make you smarter, but it can blow your mind.