Urban Honking

If you roll in certain circles, by now you might have heard that the French have discovered Portland. In a big way. PICA’s own Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy shares her experience curating a night of music and video art for an all-Portland-themed Parisian festival: In a recent interview I had with a Paris newspaper […]

Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography? Read Rimbaud! – Phillipe Diolé   I’ve written many times, although not recently, about the ocean. When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship’s log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils…

Surely, you’ve heard something about Mike Daisey over the past few days. In case you haven’t, or haven’t been paying close attention, here’s the quick recap. Mike Daisey, heir apparent to Spalding Gray, created a monologue called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” based on his visit to Chinese factories to see how […]

Plazm editor Jon Raymond’s second novel is about to be released. It is entitled Rain Dragon. I am pretty excited about it. Jon literally spent years working on this book and it’s awesome that it is finally coming out. We’ll have some signed copies in the Plazm store pretty soon, and it will be available […]

Two great shows are coming to a close. They are in the same building too. Upstairs in the Lumber Room you will find Interior Margins. Downstairs in the Elizabeth Leach Gallery you will find Body Gesture, a Group Exhibition of Feminist Art. Tomorrow is a excellent opportunity to not only see the Interior Margins show, […]

Maybe you’ve already seen these? If not, maybe you should see them already. Sebastian Schmieg – Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 Oliver Laric – 787 Cliparts

In a recent post on the BERG blog, Gardens and Zoos, Matt Jones explored a series of ideas for designing personality and life into technology products. One of the most compelling of these takes advantage of pareidolia, the natural human inclination to see faces everywhere around us. Jones’s slide introducing pareidolia. Jones advocates designing faces […]