Wow, sometimes it’s good to check out what’s going on outside my head. Look what I found today:

It’s part of the Plastiki project…  recently arrived in Sydney. Click here for an entertaining critique.

BIG WOW!

In the lineage of the Floating Neutrinos and Spiral Island, The Swimming Cities of Serenissima are set to hit the Venice Biennale this year in trashy style. Thanx to Keith Womack for the tip.

…a Mercedes Pens? Well honey, you’ll just have to talk to The Pen Guy about that. Costas Schuler is one of those rare people with so much energy it jumps out at you across the internet and licks your hand. His other blog, Art Car Central, is the only art car link I keep in my bookmarks bar now. It’s a good-looking, complete and well-researched source – and then there’s the content: he finds stuff I’ve never even heard of! Hats off to The Pen Guy… and stay tuned. He’ll be part of the traveling Visible Trash expo I’m planning for 2010.

Andy Gregg’s passion for bicycles had him working in bike shops as soon as he was able. After studying design and fine art, he merged passion and profession and has been creating elegant pieces of designer furniture from discarded bike parts since 1990. His company is called Bike Furniture Design and is located in Marquette, Michigan (USA).

I went through a trashformation of my own last month when I had to go back to Charlotte, NC to clean up a mess at my grandma’s house. While I was there I worked on some of my own mess, boxes and boxes of STUFF stored in a friend’s garage. Lesson 1 (emotional) – learn from the past then let it go. Lesson 2 (physical) –  THROW SHIT AWAY!!!

There’s a line between yanbuki and packrat, and I sure don’t want to cross it. Eek!

Media alert: A piece I wrote called “Timeline of a Transformation” was included in David Barringer’s new book, “What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years?“. 

photo by Marquinhos Silva

“A Feather on the Breath of God” is the name of an extraordinary vehicle, a moving work, a 1980 white Chevy pickup truck festooned with hundreds of pounds of white plastic all collected from Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore. It was created by Noah Lang, Richard Lang, and Judith Selby Lang. Shards of plastic, fragments from containers, hundreds of lids from water bottles, tiparillo tips, and tampon applicators were formed into patterns of waves and sunbursts on the sides, roof, and hood of the truck. 1800 lights entwined with the plastic transform the truck at night into a luminous apparition.

We travel with this truck to numerous community events and art exhibitions. It gives us the opportunity to talk with people about the detrimental effects of plastic on beach and ocean life and to have some fun along the way.

The California Coastal Commission reports in their publication “The Problem with Marine Debris” that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean. This shocking fact along with our inability to visualize the magnitude of that quantity has compelled us to count and exhibit 46,000 plastic pieces collected from California beaches.

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.”

So wrote Hildegard von Bingen, a remarkable and creative personality from the Middle Ages (1098-1179) — in fact, the most celebrated woman of her age. She was acclaimed as a visionary, naturalist, playwright, poet and composer, as well as politician. She wrote these words to describe her musical incantations and chants. As artists we affirm her words in title of the truck, in the message of the shards of plastic, in the debris from the beach.

Judith Selby Lang

Here’s a little something my friend Gizmo found somewhere in South Carolina.