What is What

Above: Food Cultivation and Deer Fence. Being involved in planting food for my family and working on securing the plants from deer, groundhogs and rats has been fun and exhausting simultaneously. I dread battling with fungus or insects and pests but so far I have not had any of those types of problems. I thought I would share these images though not exactly my work in an "ART" sort of way because it is where my creative path has brought me these past months.

Here is a REVIEW of the full show.

BELOW: playing in the studio in the run up to the opening

"Little Friends" - Bill Shannon 2013 12guage brass plate w/patina cut and formed 3"x2"

ABOVE: A Rainbow Arcs Across the Sky At WildReds Gardens. A peaceful moment. A gift from nature. Awe inspiring and humbling. There are very few moments in my life where I am setback from all the current contexts political personal etc. and can just breath and watch. This was one of them. It was hard to take a picture because I just wanted to look. A double rainbow floating in the mist on the first day of June of 2012.

ABOVE: I like to drink my tea in a taller glass rather than the traditional tea cup. The glass has no handle yet is very hot. With the insulation quality of the tetrapak I can protect my fingers and retain heat in the glass. Especially good for winter teas and coffees.

The video is pretty self evident but there are some details that are important. Maybe the next time I will narrate but for now I will just write. The video starts with a shot of the tetrapaks soaking in grey water. In this case the water is rain water collected over

In my haste to post up the step by step of breaking down a tetrapak I skipped over the various phases I have ongoing with my tetrapaks. The easiest way is to process them as they come. Taking on a bulk load or waiting till you have a bulk load is more daunting and might cause your tetrapak dedication to waver. Many restaurants throw these away ten or twenty a day. If your partner is a foodie like mine then there will be no shortage of these amazing little boxes.

ABOVE: three of the most common sizes I encounter. Note that the larger tetrapak on the left was processed later in my tetrapak journey as the edges are clean. The tetrapaks to the right were processed early on and reflect a certain ignorance as to the importance of clean edges.

Processing tetrapaks is not fun but the end result is well worth it. after the jump I show the various states of tetrapaks in my possession

I open and flatten the tetrapaks like this to try and retain clean edges. I try and use grey water to rinse them out first. This slower flattening process serves me well when I use the tetrapaks in my work later on down the line.  This 18 image sequential is step one of what I plan to be a six step process to a finished product.

ABOVE: Abnormal Smoke from Reactor # 2 Oct 22nd smoke @ 1:05. Fukushima

particle and jetstream maps after the jump

I keep dancing to stay sane, to stay grounded. I touch the ground. I have little else to hold forth against the tide of misery besetting the world at the hands of gangsters protecting scientist with fancy titles and technical arguments.These nuclear scientist are stone cold. Playing We-can-make-it-state-of-the-art.

Fukushima HORROR OF HORRORS.. WHAT DARK DEATH HAS BESET OUR MOTHER. GE YOU BRING GOOD THINGS TO DARKNESS.

Hubris. They can play GOD. But, when it comes to nuclear power, there is no art in the balance of failures to innovations only human tragedies hidden under layers of loud blanketing lies and obfuscations.

ABOVE: THE LOGIC BEING HUMANS HAVE ACCIDENTS BUT NUCLEAR SCIENTIST DONT

ABOVE: i have been dumpster diving a sign store now for years now and I am completely out of space to store anymore. I have enough letters now to write out a new message in three foot high letters of varied fonts. The truth is I love making multi-channel surround and multi-channel composite video works but lately I have fallen back into a place where the physical handmade object is reborn in the spirit of my imagination. - cont.-  I truly hate the materialism of it all when it comes to the video installation challenge. Conversely I see the material of rusted thrown out garbage decaying to a point where it becomes alive.

I have been taking lots of pictures long before the digital era when I was given a Kodak instamatic rectangular black box. Now with the ability to share it has changed the game for me. In earlier years a contact sheet was printed negatives stored away and that was it. If an image was particularly well done I would give it to my friend who worked at a lab and he would print them 8 by 10 color on the side for free. Each image now is a passing thought whereas before it was a work that earned its right to be printed. I love photography. I am not a photgrapher.

INNOVATION and ACCIDENT. This past spring I taught a semester long course at Pennsylvania State University called Innovation and Accident. The course involved some reading, some development of tools to define failures in communication and to then address those failures via innovative solutions. The course peaked with a student presentation of different approaches and strategies to problems they defined within their own very personal landscape. The solutions final class involved a group outing to a Nuclear Reactor site used for research on the edge of the main campus of the school.