⨳ These spray paint markings are everywhere in cities (St. Louis, Missouri on the left, Portland, Oregon on the right).
⨳ I hate them. I understand they are necessary for utility and city workers’ safety… but crap… I wish there was another way to explain what lies underground.
⨳ Maybe I should document and decipher them.
⨳ Abandoned parking lots never look good. But new parking lots don’t good either.
⨳ Abandoned ones do, however, get very interesting once nature starts reclaiming them. Much like Arbortecture, the idea behind Reclaimed is documenting the slow and inevitable ways that nature devours everything man-made. I mean, how fascinating is a forest with a concrete floor?
⨳ Have you read “The World Without Us“? I recommend it.
⨳ There are remnants all around us of things that used to be top-of-the-line, completely necessary, amazingly useful, etc. Payphones. Full-service neighborhood gas stations with mechanics. The list goes on forever because things keep changing.
⨳ Those things and many others change and disappear. That’s no big insight, but it’s funny how things that were once new and amazing, then were taken for granted, now stand out as unusual once again.
⨳ Payphone shot in Hollywood, service station shot in south St. Louis.
⨳ Locks for doors, clubs for cars, blocks for windows, gates for fences and any number of other hacks… all meant to attempt to keep people from stealing or otherwise ruining your stuff.
⨳ People are assholes.
⨳ Just like the folks at Not Fooling Anybody pointed out long ago, you can’t fool anybody.
⨳ You’re a big ugly fast food corporation and you shut down a location, but even if you remove your sign we’ll still know who left that ugly eyesore there, letting it get even uglier.
⨳ Well, sometimes we’re able to tell. Clockwise from top-left: Burger King, Captain D’s (?), Steak ‘n Shake, ?.
⨳ I have absolutely no doubt that if you were so inclined, and not at all worried about bugs or smells or what the neighbors thought, you could furnish an entire house with discarded furniture, appliances, art, and assorted items found in alleys or at the curb.
⨳ One day I’m sure I’ll figure out some way to organize all the photos I have of this stuff. Then I’ll make a bunch of really unappealing posters that I’ll print, sign and frame, then leave all over town so a few good and brave people can furnish their home with discarded art left in alleys made from discarded home furnishings left in alleys.
⨳ So, you know, sometimes people do funny things with their house numbers. That’s all.
⨳ This is so uninteresting I couldn’t even come up with a name for it.
⨳ Johnspotting: Finding hero portraits of the late president John F. Kennedy. They’re kind of everywhere. The amateur ones are especially great (see far right).
⨳ But you can cheat and inflate your Johnspotting score simply by going to an antique mall.
⨳ This is one of my profoundly unfinished projects.
⨳ It’s been gestating since 1996/97. Back then, on Mac OS 7 or 8, I used some forgotten shareware app to zoom into interface details and take extremely enlarged screenshots at the pixel level. I thought the look was really cool and even saw layout possibilities after using Photoshop to move things around a little on some of them.
⨳ Maybe a year later I actually coded up some HTML to make an online ‘zine called EXITEXIT, using those screenshots as page backgrounds and flowing text into the open areas. I intended to make an intense, labrynthian, fray.com-like web publication. It remains unfinished, of course, but I still have several dozen cool abstract pieces of pixel art that may, one day, become something.
⨳ But… they’ll probably just end up as a Flickr set, because maybe I don’t need to do anything with them. Maybe the screenshots themselves are the finished project.
⨳ Costumes. Lost. “Lostumes.” Get it?!?!? Hardy har-har.
⨳ On the day after Halloween, walk around the neighborhood and shoot all the sad little bits of costumes lost by kids the night before.