visual culture superstar: song dong.

song dong's recent installation at moma, "waste not" included a meticulous arrangement of every single object in his mother's home, collected over 50 years of obsessive hoarding. the evidence of a life so carefully preserved and carefully composed gives a visual representation to the material culture we live in and treasure. while song dong also artfully addresses additional themes of displacement and survival, the sheer volume of material is impossible to ignore as an indicator of our visual culture.

visual culture superstar: nicholas felton.

nicholas felton is a designer slash quality human who has made some excellent work addressing the idea of visual culture. his collaboration with matt mason for "we tell stories: hard times" takes a beautiful look at how various aspects of our visual culture like technology, social networking, and more have shaped our expectations and behavior as a society.
he is perhaps most known for his series of "feltron annual reports," a graphic map of a year of his life that quantifies, compares, and analyzes his life and puts it on display, amplifying the significance of his daily minutiae. he has also developed a website called daytum that similarly allows users to select, collect, categorize, and visually organize anything from the number of flies exterminated to frequency and location of central park hot dogs consumed.

no turning back now.

so i am terrible at making decisions. that said, i am putting in writing so i can never take it back the topic i wish to research from now until forever ad nauseum!

okay, it's visual/material/media culture, or whatever you want to call the by-products of our super-visual society.


it's a pretty all encompassing topic, but for whatever reason, the phrase 'visual culture' or the like causes instant polarization. semantics aside, i'm really interested in visual culture as this huge untapped resource for learning about... everything ever. this enormous part of everyone's collective existence, one near-universal frame of reference, has been marginalized and denounced as somehow less valid than 'not visual culture' (a tough thing to pinpoint, by the way). it's important! it's exciting!

a new friend for heart-sleeve studio.

heart-sleeve studio (and its companion blog, heart-sleeve studio blog) have served as my online handle for what i lovingly refer to as my "illustration and other nice things" for quite some time now, mostly because my name is unreasonably difficult to spell. here we have a new friend to showcase all the other nice things that i didn't actually draw slash make myself, but instead want to share so other people can make or teach or learn them too. feel free to visit heart-sleeve studio to see where i'm coming from (and probably notice that the distance is not very far at all). in any case, welcome!