Concept art across the street

My neighbour conceptual artist has been at work again at their favourite venue - the empty home at 200 Lebreton Street.

 Yesterday, City workers came looking for the water shut-off pipe. They didn't find it, but they left behind an excellent substrate for embedded art.

 I really like the little rhino coming out of the gravel.

I have not been given permission to identify the artist, but I wouldn't deny a suggestion that that is their shadow.

 Apparently, many of the images came from inside the home after Adrian, it's owner, passed away.

Table Art

The next time you are melting glass with a blowtorch in the dining room and inadvertently burn a hole in your Ikea table top, you don't have to throw out the table. You can do what I did.

1. Find a piece of glass that is somewhat bigger than the burn area and scratch lines in the table around the edge of the glass.
2. Peel off the surface of the table with a pair of pliers and remove the torched bits of cardboard honey-combing underneath. Vaccum out the bits of ash and cardboard.
3. Gather up plasticine from the craft cupboard and your the little toy pirates you've been saving on the windowsill along with a piece of the honeycombing and a smooth surface that is about the size of the hole in the table.

4. While you watch Project Runway Canada, make a sculpture of a giant squid attacking pirates in the ocean on the smooth surface. Use the honeycombing as a maximum height guide.
5. Sneak downstairs and use a spatula to place the sculpture in the hole.
6. Cover the hole with the piece of glass.
7. Go to bed and patiently wait until the next morning to be told that you are brilliant.

If you're not into sculpting a giant squid with pirates, you could instead make this into a tiny terrarium and keep little animals in there.

Uses for Carpet Scraps: Cat Throne

[Marcie and Red Vera, you may skipt this post.]

Drexel likes to keep an eye on me while I'm at the computer.

She had a chair, but it was getting in the way. So I added carpet scraps to the nightstand that is no longer needed in the guest room.

Keeping up with social media and Creativity

Once again, I am falling behind here. Meanwhile I'm all over other places on the internet.

I blogged about last week's performance of View Finder on the Propeller Dance Blog. That included uploading 277 photos to Flickr.

Also, I've been posting all sorts of things on the Astronaut Love Triangle Blog to inspire the group to new heights of artistic excellence. On the Astronaut Love Triangle Wiki, I've started making a list of creativity warm-ups.

I went looking for creativity warm-up exercises on the internet and found a startling lack of creativity about them. In particular, I kept finding suggestions that you get people to think of as many uses for a brick as they can imagine. I don't believe this is because there is something inherently creativity-inspiring about bricks. I think the people drafting the exercise couldn't be bothered to think of their own objects with non-obvious uses.

Just to check on this, I googled a series of phrases starting with "things you can do with a lightbulb" [There was only one when I did it, but there'll be at least two if you do it now.] "Things you can do with a brick" was the winner with 29 hits. [30 now]

This reminds me of a story that I heard from the famous Seymour Papert back in 1984. He had heard the story from Jean Piaget when he studied with him in the '60s.

It seems there was this elite school in France for artistic youth. One day they had a celebrated painter visiting them. At dinner, he asked about how they selected the students who would attend and they told him that they tested them for creativity.

"How do you test creativity?" he asked.

"We have a number of exercises and questions, for example, we ask them to list as many things as they can think of do with a brick."

"A brick..." said the artist. He pondered a while. "I suppose you could use it to build a house..." He thought more until the silence grew awkward and someone changed the topic.

Getting back to the internet and social media. I've signed up for two things that I just don't get. LinkedIn and Twitter. Am I missing something? Is there a point to either? Is there something beyond getting all my friends to join up so we can waste each others time and receive targeted advertising?