This is what happened when I typed my name into “Personas,” an installation by Aaron Zinman.

You type in your name and it data mines the web, giving you an analysis of the findings. From the website:

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It is a critique of data mining, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors.

Since I don’t have a last name, I used “needle felting” so it’d only return info about me. As a result, I think this is more of a summation of the themes of my work. Spooky how much this program gleaned about what’s “behind the cute” of a lot of what I create.

What will Personas say about you?

(Thanks to @SisterDiane and @feliciaday.)

I constantly feel that this podcast isn’t really FOR me… maybe it isn’t for anybody, which is also maybe why it works so well. Sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s like eavesdropping, sometimes it makes me uncomfortable. It’s experimental, open-ended, it doesn’t always work, I’m fairly convinced that it’s art, and I love listening.

It’s like drinking a big steamy cup of stream-of-consciousness bisque while taking an extended vacation on Premise Beach.

It’s also a little like Coyle & Sharpe, but self-contained:

“So, if you were going to be the administrative sleeping figure head for this African Virginia University, with lions, is this the kind of thing that could interest you?”

See?

Clicky.

Sometimes a forwarded email from a cousin you never speak to yields gold.

Is that too embarrassing to say out loud? Should I feel shame? Guess what? I don’t care, I gots to get me some essence that smell like vittles!!

My sister Rachel is a creative individual and a licensed cosmetologist specializing in makeup and skin care. She gave me some lovely vanilla perfume oil for my birthday because I confessed to her my desire to smell like cookies. (By the way, having a smart beauty expert for a sister is like having a doctor in the family. Seriously, you should be really jealous.)

She got it here, and now I do smell like a baked good. Trouble is that I think I need to smell like more foods… Maybe apple, or strawberry or chocolate or something!? I don’t know but I’m going on a snack smelling journey. Advice is gladly accepted.

(Part of me hopes I find a perfume oil called “Swedish Meatballs” or “BLT” but I would never wear them… probably.)

I can always count on my friend LeAnne to sort things out for me on a lot of levels…

Inspiration to combine my love of shiny garbage and broken toys with felting has had some interesting results. This guy is just a sneaky peek at what I’ve been working on.

That’s a discarded pinball lightbulb in his head, and a nut (sans bolt) on his tummy.

One of the challenges and biggest learning opportunities of these mixed-media pieces has been to secure all objects only with the needle and wool. I’m going to have to start calling myself a fundamentalist at this point with the crazy obsession with the “purity” of my work. I’m oddly dedicated to the exclusion of sewing, embroidery, glue, etc, which means keeping the foreign objects securely in the sculptures has been work… but well worth it.

More to come.

i found a bag of airport, government and various municiple toy vehicles at goodwill. i peeled off the decals of the now-defunct airline, grabbed up some sharpies and went to town.

now when i put on arrested development, i can play too! wanna hop on?

what is in these chips
that i’d cheapen my blog with
snack food poetry?

i was going to wait until i had a ton of designs, but i just could not resist sharing. i’m terrible at waiting.

can’t stop making them, either. they are the crafty equivalent of snacking on potato chips!

when the movie independence day came out, i read a great review by mick lasalle, containing this point:

These early scenes capitalize on the dark human tendency to enjoy watching people get bad news. The kicks keep coming: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Robert Loggia) is told that the object heading toward Earth can’t be a meteor because it’s slowing down (“It’s slowing down?”)

he’s so right! the only thing more common to film (and tv) than watching people get bad news is watching people get bad news from afar. for instance the action of the bad news revelation happens on the other side of a window, or across a noisy room. we know what they are being told, and it is not good news, but they are far away from us and for some reason, it feels more perverted that way.

i’ve been fairly obsessed with this idea since i first saw the lame quasi-lifetime movie “just between friends.” thanks to hulu, i can show you the clip!

first we get to see christine lahti find out that ted danson is dead. then we get to see about 400 hours of full frontal aerobics by mary tyler moore, who is married to the now-dead danson, she just doesn’t know it until… let’s watch, shall we?

i know i’ve seen this done dozens of times since then. i’d love to put a montage of these scenes together. for fun. sort of like this genius tv carnage “gun and badge” montage:

anyway, let me hear from you if you have good examples of this, or if you know about any established term or convention for this technique.

p.s. independence day is so much better with rifftrax!