The Unfinished

 
⨳ 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.

 
⨳ 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.

 
⨳ 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.

 
⨳ Walking the dog in the morning you get pretty familiar with the neighborhood sidewalks. You notice all the footprints (human, dog, other) and bike tire tracks left in what used to be fresh concrete. Everyone’s got somewhere to go.

 
⨳ If you wanted to, you could get yourself a whole new outfit by picking clothes up off the street.
 
⨳ If you wanted.
 
⨳ Or, it could be cool to take a photo of each item and arrange them in a layout that placed them in approximately the correct location if you were to be wearing them. Much cleaner that way.

 
⨳ Most businesses keep the front of their premises pretty clean. But you can just as easily see the back of their property by walking into the alley.
 
⨳ And it usually looks quite different.