Wicker Park’s 826CHI (www.826chi.org) is an after-school writing program for Chicago kids ages 6-18. The center is part of a nation-wide chain of free writing programs founded by novelist Dave Eggers, who also publishes the popular McSweeney’s magazine and humor web site.
The program has been offering drop-in tutoring, field trips and bookbinding programs for local school kids for more than a year and has just put the finishing touches on its storefront: a mysterious and often-times hilarious “secret agent supply store” known as “The Boring Store.”
According to 826CHI Executive Director Leah Guenther, the secret camera-glasses, mustache disguise kits and underwater voice amplifiers in The Boring Store serve a triple purpose: they fund new programs for the 826CHI kids, jolt them with quick doses of imagination every time they drop by and grab the attention of every adult (a.k.a. potential volunteer) who secretly thinks he would have made one heck of a spy in another life.
Let’s take a look at the only store in Chicago that denies its own existence.
[ txt,img src: The Chicago Methods Reporter ]
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Filed under: art, culture, people, space/place
Filed under: art, music, people
“DROPCLOCK” is an aesthetically intriguing motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy Helvetica dropping into water in super slow-motion. Be captivated as the contrasting elements of organic water and solid typography infinitely morph and mix.
[ text.img via SCR ]
Filed under: art, design, graphics, new media, technology
November 4, 2007 • 8:18 am
Filed under: art, films, music, people
November 2, 2007 • 4:54 pm
( text source: mindhacks, image source: imdb )
The Psychologist has just made an article available that looks at the parallels between the most recent David Lynch film, Inland Empire, and what we know of the psychology of psychosis.
The article looks at some of the proposed pathologies of psychosis, drawn from cognitive science, and suggests how these are represented in Lynch’s latest movie.
Paranoia comes with an inherent sense of personal threat and concomitant fear. Inland Empire’s dark and chilling world is produced in part by David Lynch’s use of story. While fear is generated with genuinely unsettling imagery and dark shadowy lighting, it also comes from the carefully managed attrition of any recognisable storyline. The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.
Lynch’s hallucinatory style certainly suggests altered realities and this is not the first time that it has been linked with mind-being reality distortion, as countless interpretations of Mulholland Drive testify.
Link to article ‘David Lynch and psychosis’.
Filed under: art, films, people
October 31, 2007 • 5:23 pm
Filed under: art, films, music, people
