Pencil Mag 1

recently i found an old collection of m i x - t a p e s from friends and got that great feeling of sharing in the sound that moved someone else. half of what made a mix-tape good was that someone built it out of what inspired them and the other half was that they made it thinking about you. so i decided to start sending out a weekly letter a . k . a a small digital mixtape. nothing much a picture or two, a poem, maybe some art, some thoughts, and a song. that simple. just some things that inspire and inform. stay brave kind of things & make art kind of things. maybe i am doing it for me maybe i am doing it for you. but probably both, because we are in it together

PENCIL

one

MAG

YOUR FACE LIKE A GRAVEYARD HOLLOW AND IMPLICIT IN THE CONJURING OF SO MANY MEMORIES that summer we discovered the importance of subtlety and shades of gray carefully choosing the ways in which we would learn to discern our positions laying out invisible road maps without compass or legend just the will to become whatever it is we were meant to become that summer we were divining rods extending toward the new dawn’s horizon that summer we were stanchions bending to the tune of a thousand pulsing soundwaves in smoky apartments deep in the heat of a lynchpin August a vortex of passions crossfaded and transformed tables turning and ready for battle a hundred years of solitude baked into perfect oblivion teaching us the lessons behind the elasticity of space/time everything expanding Mandelbrotan fractal and blackhole contracting wicked and flayed that summer spent sweltering in sweet little high desert sweatboxes finding that forever may not look like we thought that summer with our unwritten histories skeining out in front of us our intentions intertwined and tangled like so many cat’s cradles that summer we promised ourselves the world and still meant it that summer we still believed that we deserved it that summer we had no idea how to get it that summer was so

fucking

- by Ian R. Dougherty

hot.

mellow like jello, so put it in ya ear, eugene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1YKfu5sD24

Untitled (Arm) by Jakob Kolding (2013) Digital print on birch veneer

Untitled (Lying Up) by Jakob Kolding (2013) Digital print on birch veneer

As I have thought about the potential of having a new building over the past few weeks, I could not help but think of Gaston Bachelard’s philosphical beauty, The Poetics of Space. Also, I could not help but think of the scope of the project and the importance of each decision as if we are, in fact, building a house for ideas, for language, for images, and, most importantly, for dreaming.

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard veers away from speaking of architecture itself but elaborates instead on the lived experience of architecture. He points out how the dynamics of a space can revive the memory, enliven the imagination, and hold the body safe for dreaming. The great effort here, the great challenge, is to put a roof over ideas without constricting them. To provide bodies the environments they need to think, commune, make, and dream. While I will most likely revisit this book in the future, here, I wanted to pay special attention to his ideas of reverie. In this case, specifically, day dreaming. The wandering mind... The kind we used to get scolded for in school... The classic zone out.

Bachelard, a French philosopher and contributor to the fields of both poetics and science, championed the power of daydreaming by stating that the “daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” The point of Bachelard’s push for spaces that allow for dreaming was not to promote laziness, but instead to express the productive romance between time and untethered thought. Intentional time set aside for daydreaming provides one’s thoughts the room to wander beyond the usual boundaries. The daydream gets past the border, the writer’s block, the passionless trudging, the strict deadlines, and thinks big. Big like infinity.

A spark in boundless space.

Dr. Scott Kaufman, a professor of psychology at New York University, writes that “Daydreaming is where things like problem solving, creativity, goal driven thought, future planning, seeing the perspective of another person, and so on – find space to exist.” He reminds that the magic lies not in simply letting the mind wander but having the ability to recognize the great insights when they come and then focusing in and running with them.

Daydreaming leads to creativity, and creative activities teach us agency, the ability to change the world, to mold it to our liking, to have a positive effect on our environment. The thing is, Aha moments don’t usually come from a directed and particular focus on a task, but by letting your mind wander and open up to other possibilities. We often come up with solutions to life problems while in the shower or doing mundane tasks such as pulling weeds. According to John Kounios, who studies creativity and distraction, these “mindless” activities allow the brain to break out of a linear focus and engage in free association. It doesn’t take much to shake up stuck thoughts... A walk around the block, a break from the screen, or simply letting a couple of honey badgers loose in the room.

Dream about this, in 1974, Arthur Fry, of 3M, invented the sticky note while zoning his way through a Sunday church service.

A sticky note in boundless Space.

Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting.

-Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’ Further reading: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/shower-thoughts/

bla blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

TO DO: DAYDREAM