[de]sein

last night i went to an opening at honfleur for a show called gesture. an artist created a brick-sized painting for the every one of the almost 3,000 lives lost on 9/11. while i can’t say that i loved the individual images or imagery, the impact of the piece was forceful. as soon as you walked into the gallery you sensed the size of the impact of that day as almost every square inch of wall space in the gallery was covered. and you began to imagine the dozens and hundreds of other lives connected and effected by the loss of each of these.

the show was loosely split up into four or five base color palettes. this picture shows the transitions between the colors.

my favorite part of the show i couldn’t get a good picture of. all of the paintings are done on cellophane so that the artist could lay down large sections of background colors, cut them up, and then paint on the opposite side, basically allowing paint on both sides of the ‘canvas’. but because of the shininess of the material, each piece reflected the gallery lights onto the floor creating beautiful light patterns on the floor. it reminded me very much of light reflecting off of or light passing through water. another example of the unintended beauty of the things we create.

in the past couple of weeks i’ve recognized the sad state of my bag. the duct tape continually puts a sticky residue on my laptop, a majority of the pockets have holes, and the velcro has come almost completely detached. this, along with the high prices of nice messenger bags and lack of availability of cheap, cool versions, i began to investigate how i might make my own. thusly, i stumbled upon this. it’s a guy who took old vinyl signs and made them into bags. and the coolest thing is that he’s put his designs out with a creative commons license so if you want to make one for yourself, everything is cool, if you want to make some to sell using his design, you have to get his permission or pay him. seeing as how it’s just for me, i procured myself a vinyl sign (if you happen to recognize this logo, i don’t know what you’re talking about) and got to it.

the bag he designed was fairly large. larger than i needed so i shrank it down a bit, but used a lot of the same dimensions. and here’s what i got.

judging by the post title you may have already guessed that i sewed this by hand. and no, i did not have a thimble. but i now understand how one might really be nice. my fingertips are still sore.

there are a few details that i still need to do. i would also like to change the strap and how it is connected to the bag. for this one i just scavenged the strap and d-rings from my old bag. i would like to perhaps use a grommet to clip to, or perhaps something else. anyway, i wore it to work yesterday and it worked fine. it was nice and light, and without so many pockets i don’t feel a need to fill it up with junk.

if you’re interested (and if you’re reading this page, you probably are for one reason or another) catie is slowly explaining her thesis project on her blog. very interesting stuff dealing with how a site should determine the architecture rather than the architecture imposing itself on the site. and there are pretty pictures and drawings.

so i know that no one is currently reading this thing, but i’m going to post this like there are. maybe in the future someone will actually find this page and therefore discover the bouroullec brothers.

i found these guys’ website a few weeks ago while researching grad schools that i may want to go to. anyway, seeing their work was the most inspiring design moment i have had in a long time. they are doing very interesting things and i enjoyed looking at them. so, lonely reader of the future, enjoy. (and let me know how the future is).