Billy's update 1/29/07

I have a sad, practically non-update this week. I spent my weekend enjoyably but mostly non-productively, except for when Lauren taught me to knit. Thanks, Lauren. So I'm 1/3 done with the biggest scarf in the world, but no additional lamps. And this visiting art program has now taken over VAPA for the week. I thought I had another day to sneak in and make some progress, but they've already set up and I'm not allowed in. So I'm a little stalled.

In other news, this week I read the worst young adult novel ever, page-turningly horrible, and decided to write my own young adult novel, which would have to be better than that. If I get more than halfway finished with this task, ever, I will make some lazy attempts at getting it published. What I have in my corner is the immense number of young adult books I've read in my life, and the fact that I have absolutely no artistic scruples about writing, and would be willing to write about any hot button issue that I thought would sell. I have a basic plot outline and chapter one. What more could I need?

My career trajectory might now be: Keep about 6 different pots on the stove and wait for one to boil. I'm having a lot of trouble with focus lately.

Tired but painting

I forgot to mention that I'm applying to be a special ed teacher through the NYC teaching fellows. There's a less than one in eight chance that I'll get in, but I thought I might as well try, because being a receptionist is eating my brain right up.
Regardless, I started painting another portrait, it is big, about life-sized, but i can't get the eyes right. Also, I've made about 35 drawings in the past week, which I'll post as soon as i can, but i have to find a scanner first.
Anyway, that's all,
love,
Julie

Rachel's update 1/29

Hi guys,

So, just updating you. After a two-week hiatus following my meltdown, I was able to start work on the regular old Weather Report again. I caught up with the days I missed, and I think I've realized that it serves me best when I use it only as an index of sorts; it's really just data, after all, and it's great that it's in this accessible one-page-a-day format, so I can go back and find out the sequence of events when I'm trying to remember something. I think my original goal to reinvigorate the Weather Report was actually misguided, in that I expected the Weather Report to be able to hold the work I want to make and do with my life, when really, it's just a place to record stuff that happens to use as material for what I make and do.

And wouldn't you know, but during the two-week hiatus, I actually felt moved to write. Like, actual stuff, not just lengthy emails. I'm not ready to share any of it, and I have the new roadblock of not owning a computer that actually works (I'm using the computer at work right now, and every other time you hear from me, as my own computer has been reduced to little more than a footrest) when I want it to. Didn't used to be a problem when I never wanted to use it. Anyway, I've been excercising my writing hand, and maybe before this productivity pact is over I'll have a little story or a poem or some sentence to share with you all. I think this is very exciting and productive, even if it's mostly mentally productive.

As a parting gift, here's something Cyle said on Friday when we were at the WalMart: "I just flop around when I'm not wearing socks."

-Rachel

Lauren's update 1/28/07

Hi guys,
This week I made this elephant, gave the seal a face, and made this skirt. The skirt was a pretty big accomplishment for me, since I don't usually use patterns or finish my sewing projects. Also I used fabric that's been in my fabric bin since high school which is good. I have a very large fabric collection and if I don't use at least some of it in the near future it will be hard to justify hauling it all the way to Portland.

I also worked on a sweater I'm knitting, but a couple hours ago I realized I had skipped an important part so I had to rip out everything I did this week. Oh well.
I also taught two boys to knit which isn't one of my goals but I think it oughta count for something.
I applied for two jobs in Portland.
I played a little banjo.
I think I am going to redefine my crafty goals a little. I'm not as excited about making things to sell on etsy, although I do still want to set up a little store. Lately I've been having fun making things to keep or give to my friends so I'm just going to go with that.
Also, thanks to everyone who posted stuff this week. My job is pretty boring so its always fun to see somebody's way cool project. It gives me hope that we won't all work boring jobs forever but instead will make way cool projects that will somehow make us lots of cash monies and life will be one big party. damn the man, or something.

the ice melts onto ice cream onto the floor. fingers.

Maia here.
Well, quite a breath without much productivity.

I have been slowly making progress on my sweater. The rows are so painstakingly long, it seems like eons before I finish a started row.

oh dear, I think this might be the time to mention I will need to cut down my list of goals. I am leaving in four days for bennington once again. That does not mean I have to conclude my projects, however!

let's see if I can get back on track.

I think of you all, and your respective work.

love from Maia!

Billy's Update 1/22/07

I don't have any photos this week, because so far I've only cut the wood, not assembled it. In the works are:
-A lamp modeled after plaid, with a front panel made of a woven pattern of red and yellow wood of two different widths
-A taller, functional version of the curvy little guy I made last week
-The first stage of a lamp/bookshelf combination unit
I also got a book on interlibrary loan called Residential Lighting: A Practical Guide, and I can pick up The Martha Rules tomorrow. I'm up to item 200ish out of the 999 best designed objects. This far in, I can confidently say that some of these objects are boring to read about, and some are even downright ugly. Also, the book itself is very poorly designed, which is humorous. The font type and size sometimes change drastically from page to page, which makes it very hard to read for long periods of time. Unless it was designed to make me need the ultimate designer accessory: glasses.

Maybe there's something in the water in Bennington right now, but I've found that I, similar to Rachel, have been doing a lot of frantic thinking lately. Specifically, I am reconsidering almost everything I have come to take for granted about my life and future. So if anyone has any suggestions about what I should do with the rest of my life, don't hesitate to let me know. I am more open to advice now than ever.

Finally Here (sort of)

Hi Team,
it's taken me forever and ever to get on the ball, but now that I'm on it, I think I got it rolling pretty well now.

*I have been painting pictures, but I think I need to step it up and paint some more.

*I think I need to keep better track of all the drawings and things I make throughout the day, instead of just leaving them in random places (although last night I was at this weird party in this fancy house in Long Island, and I made an ugly child out of cocktail toothpicks, and a champagen cork, and then hid it in a cabinet. I like to think that they will be profoundly confused when they see it).

*Also, I have been writing down my dreams lately, then I started to illustrate them. I'll post pictures soon. In my last memorable dream (and subsequent illustration series) i was a 700 pound white sow.

*I think actual documentation is going to be a big part of my plan too.
Love,
Julie

crap

the thing cut my pictures in half. oh well.

HTML, what?

I was introduced to one more of the features Google offers that makes it the internet super power that it is: GooglePages. I've wanted to try creating a website for my work for a while, but I don't know much about computers (and can never seem to be interested in spending the time to learn the real way to do it. Call me lazy maybe, but my attention span gets like that of a 4 year old when you say "HTML".) so I thought I'd wait until an easy DIY (and free) option came up. Google gave me that DIY option and now a new goal for the Winter, is to get it started. This week, I have. It's at http://cylemetzger.googlepages.com/ Tell me what you think- again, I know nothing about how to put something like this together or what it should look like.

Lauren's update 1/21/07

Hi everyone,
This is my first time using a blog, and I'm trying to put pictures in here, but I'm not sure if I know how.
My updates:
I made some things which you can see here.
>
I've been making weird little pins and some earrings, and last night I was looking through this weird book from the 70s of stuffed animals, and got inspired to make this little seal.

It still needs eyes. I realized I like making little creatures even though just this tiny one took like three hours and i got stabbed in the finger 17 times. It was really fun to make anyway and i am very happy with it. Once I finish this blog i think i will make some more.
I also worked more on this scarf which is pretty ridiculous looking but I decided to think like that cake photo Billy showed us and just keep plowing through it. I still have to figure out the digital camera I got for Christmas because the colors are really off in these.

The colors are just as silly in real life but a different kind of silly.
This week I did not practice the banjo very much. dang.
I now have a workspace.
I did some of the applying for jobs work, but I need to do more.
I love all of you.
Over and out.

So Cyle can attest to the fact that I had a 2-weeks-into-FWT meltdown yesterday. If I were a man living in Europe, we would call it an existential crisis, but since I'm a girl in Vermont, we'll stick with meltdown. I bought a sketch book that is too big, and it made me feel like my life is small. I spent the morning sleeping late and taking my time getting dressed in order to heal from this experience. I plan on acquiring a more manageable recepticle for the Weather Report and approaching it with a bit of caution.

That said, here are a couple things I learned in my first few days of the revived Weather Report:
-avocados are botanically classified as a berry
-florescent colors are so bright because they capture rays of UV light that we can't normally see, and project them back out in a visible spectrum

C'mon slow poke.

I need to publicly state that I don't feel I have done enough yet. Granted, I'm still settling back into being at Bennington, but I'm coming up on a breaking point where I could just never start working.

So here's what I've done. I have had to re-familiarize myself with some of the writings that are going into the personal history project, and I've done that. Just re-reading them got me back into it, so there's hope. And I keep looking at my old sketch book and getting a little turned off by it, so I think I'm going to start a new one all together. I think I also want to try to come up with a better way to use a sketchbook. I need a system, so I'm going to come up with one.

There, that made me feel a bit better about what I'm doing. Thanks Productivity Pact.

Billy's Update 1/15/07

This week I did okay, certainly not great by my own standards. I had a lot of free time.
I did this. It's about 14 inches high, which I learned was sort of short. It was mostly an experiment to make sure that it would stand up that way, since the thin, thin strips are all that's holding it up. Now that I've made it, though, I want to see if far larger. Like, a 5 foot high floor lamp made out of 1.5 inch wide strips rather than .75 inch wide like this one. That's a stupid thing for me to make when I'm going to move in 6 months, but I might make it anyway.


I also made these little guys. The one in the middle is the correct version of what some of you have seen the wrong version of hanging on my wall. The proportions were a little wacked. This is the "display model" for how it ought to be. The two little curvy guys on the side were experiments to make sure that the strips wouldn't snap when I curved them. They didn't. Now I don't know what to do with them. They're a little too small to function as is. I made half of another lamp too, but then the other half failed miserably and involved me pulling a piece of rice paper back and forth for ten minutes to get it straight, then having it unstraighten itself under the tremendous weight of a tiny strip of Elmer's glue. I swore and kicked some things and then wrote it off.

I didn't make this this week. I won't lie. I made this a couple years ago, and had to bring it home this week because I was afraid the construction workers in the Upstairs Cafe would trash it. It's made me realize how I miss making things that looked like this, and I've added a goal to my list to again try and make something like this but more portable, and with fewer giant problems. I may also switch to incandescent lighting for the next one. Cross your fingers it doesn't light on fire.


In other news, the library at Bennington got this giant 3 book set of the 999 best designed objects in history. I'm pledging to read the descriptions (short as they are) of all 999. So far I'm up to 131. This week's highlight: ancient Chinese scissors. Look at a pair of scissors some time. They're so clever.

Who we are and what we do

So far the productivity pact has brought us this far: we have met each other and shared our goals. For blog posterity, here they are again:

• Jesse's Productivity Pact '07

1. Get home movies from both sides of the family transfered to MiniDV. Find a place that transfers film. Transfer videos from VHS. Start logging the footage. Figure out what if anything to do with it. Other than being amazed by my parents stylish hair in the late eighties.

2. Write a video game with Joe Holt's help.

• Cyle

1. fill one sketch book (or the rest of one and get well into another). I want to start next term with a few potential projects instead of wasting time in the beginning figuring out what I'm
actually going to do. I'm thinking of the sketchbook as something like an idea bank that I can put all of the passing project ideas that I usually don't have the time for when I think of them. Even if I lose interest in some of them, at least they'll still sort of exist.

2. research picture frame project. there are details to come on this one, but I want to do a project using picture frames, and it would help the idea if I spent some time thinking about different elements of it and researching the history of others to find out where exactly
I want to go with the idea. I never feel like I do enough research, or never have enough time to do it as thoroughly as I'd like. I also want to actually mess around with the items themselves a lot, because even if I feel like I don't get enough research done, I feel like a lot of the time I over conceptualize the idea without considering the material early enough in it's development.

3. keep going with the personal history project I started in the fall. not sure exactly where the project is going, but I started putting things together and I want to see it through.

• Lauren

My main goal is to do a lot of crafting in the next 6 weeks. I am not choosing the "what" at this point, but I'll be knitting, sewing, making jewelry, and whatever else I think of. I'm not forcing myself to be specific at this point so that I can go with whatever inspires me on a particular day. I also want to open an etsy store (etsy is sort of like ebay for handmade things) and experiment with selling some of the things I make. I don't like workin for the man anymore than the next lady, but I do like making things. I hope that one day I can at least partially support myself through art or crafts or whatever, so it will be good for me to play around with selling stuff and see how it goes.

My immediate goal is to set up a comfortable workspace in my apartment. Right now I don't have anything resembling that, and I know that my environment definitely affects how creative and productive I feel. So by the end of the weekend I will clean up the living room and set up an area that's fun to work in and has all my materials easily accessible.

• Andray

for the month of January im working on two short stories that ill like to make significant progress on. the first, on st. lucian folklore, id like to have a rough, pre-first draft, so that ill have enough momentum to eventually complete it. the second, a personal essay, id like to have a complete arc so that it's at least readable from beginning to end.

• Emily

I think I’ll promise to finish five short things until I love them. They can be descriptions of imaginary diseases or poems or anything else, as long as they’re small. I can make as many as I want and also work on longer stories, but I have to have five small things made of words and love them all by the end of the pact. Five seems like a small number, but it might take me many tries to turn them into things I love.

• Billy

1. Make at least 5 new lamp designs. Produce them all to "completion" even if I realize about halfway through that they won't be any good. Display the good ones in the President's Gallery during early Spring Term. My new design themes are to try and make things more simply/quickly, make things more stable/shippable, and to "love my enemies", in the form of the cords, bulbs, and other stuff that I haven't ever really integrated into a design, just tried to tack on a solution to.

2. Make a "display model" for each of the lamps that people commonly ask for, that I will mark as a display model and not sell, even when it would be really convenient.

3. Take catalog-esque ad photos with human models that can stand up to Real Catalog scrutiny. Like, there won't be stacks of CDs and empty soda cans in the background, unless I place them there for some particular artistic purpose. This will require a lot of fancy footwork and arranging in my apartment. I also want to take some around those fancy leather couches in the New Houses.

4. Get more educated about what I'm doing by reading books/magazines about: small businesses, design, and woodworking. The only thing I'll say specifically on this right now is that I plan to read The Martha Rules by Martha Stewart, because she made herself a fortune, she's gotta have some good advice.

• Jeff(erson)

I'm working on an album and a movie. My goal is to have something boring and something interesting done every Wednesday. Tomorrow for example I hope to have a preliminary budget (boring) and a mask for the killer in the movie (interesting) finished. My focus is currently on the movie side of things, but a minimum of two interesting things are going to be songs for the album.

• Sally

independent study goals

1. continue crawling around grandfather's attic looking for albums, finish scanning all my grandparents' old crumbly photo albums (without damaging them) by next week, categorize and start indentifying the people in the pictures with help from grandfather/mom and make notations

2. start cleaning, cropping, adjusting pictures on aperture

3. start researching questions to ask grandfather for life history interviews (ask mom, aunts, etc.); set dates and times for hour long interview sessions..set aside time to transcribe each interview, prepare and label DV tapes, check audio equipment, etc.

4. start mapping out blueprint for dvd digital archive

non-independent study goals:

1. clean up all audio on most recent video project, fix small glitches, re-do dvd

2. if bored, start transcribing and logging every DV tape i have, because it will help me in the long run but it's a pain in the ass to do

3. design and make new dvds of selected works to give to family/friends

4. watch a lot of good movies via netflix

5. read at least 3 books

6. learn how to cook something nice

7. write letters to friends

• Maia

1. Finish knitting the bottom half (at least) of the sweater I am working on.

2. Make 10 (yes, 10) mix tapes, and send them off to the receiver. The Productivity Pact group I will count as one friend to save me some o' that precious time (if you would like one, please
email your address)

3. Complete a special box of goodies for an old friend. To be included in this box is: 1 mobile, 1 mix tape, 1 pouch to keep mix tape. Pack up in box. Make box pretty. Deliver.

4. Brainstorm, doodle, design 5 new ideas for dioramas to be made next term. These brainstorms must be detailed drawings and descriptions of the suggested projects, as well as a detailed list of needed materials.

• Elizabeth

1. Figure out my new camera including all bells/whistles, buying a battery for the light meter (battery this afternoon).

2. Starting next week, when my film arrives, shoot at least a roll a day.

3. Research color dark rooms in San Francisco and find one I like.

4. Contact the new rolls I've shot or get machine prints by the end of February and maybe start printing.

ALSO,

5. Make a mobile with part of my X-Ray collection.

6. Learn to crochet and make a scarf by the end of February.

• Rachel

1. TO REINVIGORATE THE WEATHER REPORT.

For those who are not already familiar with this endeavor of mine, I started a daily scrapbook last January 24, in which I past/tape/paperclip/write/glue information about what happened to me that day-- recording detritus, basically, like receipts and all that other shit you'd throw away. I've kept it up pretty steadily all year, which is impressive, but I've been feeling lately like I treat it more like a repository than a project, unlike the early days when I used to think about it before falling asleep, and carry around a pencil and post-its in my back pocket to record stuff. It's about time I woke it back up again, and I decided to start by literally buying a new sketchbook with bigger pages. I want to keep evolving it, which means not just settling into a pattern of taping stuff in every 4 or 5 days. Hopefully, if all goes well, I can photograph a couple pages to share with people in a couple weeks.

2. TO WRITE A PROPER ARTIST'S STATEMENT FOR THE WEATHER REPORT

Which I will share as it develops.

3. TO KNIT A PAIR OF SOCKS FOR MY MOM.

I promised her these for her birthday, which was January 4th. I bought the yarn and the needles, my next step is to research a pattern today, and I think I can start knitting by tomorrow.