Sean Lynch

So last Thursday I went with a few people in my lab to see some videos by a group called Negativland, with an introduction to each video by Mark Hosler, one of the founding members. For those of you who don’t know (this included me up until last Wednesday), Negativland are a mash up group who have been making videos for about 30 years. They traditionally do mash ups of pop culture, to make political points, humor, criticize religion, or to just stir shit up. For that, I give them mad props. The videos were all entertaining, although an interesting discussion came up with a friend about whether mash up could be done without ugliness(as, truthfully, each video was quite an eye sore), and whether aesthetics should still be there in all art. I don’t feel aesthetics are necessary, but I do think it’s interesting to see the variance in opinions towards aesthetic. I always like things that bring up emotions in me, and usually prefer ones that bring up happy ones; aesthetic always plays an important role in bringing comfort into an equation, or at least making people feel pleased to look at something. At the same time, the ugliness of the work can work as a great metaphor for the mismash of visuals that we are bombarded with in our culture. Mind you, with all art, hopefully the emotion that you feel in it comes out; when creating work critical of culture, it’s usually critical of it aesthetically as well, and provokes ugly thoughts.

Anyways, here’s a video from the group.

Last semester I took a bunch of photos of a typewriter for the first project. I had to make a board of a few of these, cut to 50mmx50mm, which I may list here if I choose to show some of my work from the semester. This typewriter represents a month and a half of suffering in my life that I’ll unfortunately be forced to remember. I do now have an obsession with typewriters, and I’ll think about posting some of the terribleamazing projects I did.

One of the things I am most fond of in this world is a South American tea called Yerba maté. For those of you unaware of this wonderful substance, Yerba maté is a highly caffeinated tea that looks sort of like grass clippings. It has an earthy taste, and has similar effects to coffee, in terms of the jolt of energy you will get from drinking it. While coffee tends to dehydrate you, and can leave you feeling jittery and anxious, with a crash at a certain point, I find Yerba maté actually works to hydrate; the crash is almost non-existent, and you tend to come down from your buzz, or high, at a slower rate. Also, Yerba maté is incredibly cheap, as long as you don’t get it from tea houses. Go to any middle eastern grocer, greek grocer, and purchase the tea, as the rates will be drastically lower. For example, I pay between 6-7$/kg of Yerba maté, vs. 35$/kg at a tea house. If anyone’s looking for a place, the Kalamatta(sp?) grocer on 11th street and 15th ave SW (in Calgary, of course) provides it, along with many other teas at an incredibly cheap rate. I think my tea budget for six months is about 20$, and I drink usually 3-4 small pots of tea a day. If you can beat that with coffee, without having some sort of slave labour in your basement, then you have some hook ups that I clearly do not.

In terms of my life, I’m going on to my second year of my Master’s in Computational Media Design. I have a thesis topic; I’m working on musical instruments on digital tabletops, and trying to make them both easy to use and fostering collaborative interaction. I’ll try and post videos of this, but I really don’t know what I can or can’t show until I’ve submitted the paper to a conference. UIST will be my preferred conference for it, and I’m really hoping to get in. So, in April there may be videos if I can’t post one in the upcoming weeks. Just know that it’s sweet, and that it will (hopefully) blow your fucking socks off. Not just your sucks–your fucking socks. A side note: does anyone else think “fucking” makes a great adjective? It’s ambiguous, completely impossible to understand if you’re not a native speaker, and adds to the overall level of potty mouth in society, but it just seems to have that oomph that makes me wanna stand up and take notice. Take notice of my fucking socks. Taking notice of my socks, unfortunately, makes me aware of the holes in them. I should probably resolve that. I think I’m down to less than three pairs of socks without holes. Shit.

Anyways, I’ll try to update more. Hopefully the updates will get funnier, and involve less conversations about the word fuck and about my socks. This is, unfortunately, the type of stuff I think about. It’s safe to say I’ll probably die alone.