40th AAFF

The parade was made up of artists working across media, including these moving image formats: S8mm, 16mm, VHS, SVHS, and miniDV. The Asian Martial Arts lion dance troupe joined the parade. Here is the project I made to celebrate 4 decades of artist-made cinema at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2002. Jason asked me to marry him during the Festival that year, and we did on the next Autumnal Equinox at Art Farm in Nebraska.

My Current Reading List

Teo, Stephen

King Hu's A Touch of Zen

Hong Kong University Press 2007

Brem, Marion Luna

Women Make the Best Salesmen

Random House 2004

Jou, Tsung Hwa

The Dao of Taijiquan, Way to Rejuvination

T'ai Chi Foundation, Scottsdale AZ 1981

Weinzweig, Ari

A Lapsed Anarchists Approach to Being a Better Leader

Zingerman's Press, Ann Arbor 2012

McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, Brooks

Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts

Rand Corporation, 2004

mulberry season

One Night Eight Years Ago in Knoxville TN...

Fastest Chopsticks (2005)

We were in town to participate in an a/v showdown for the "Unreal Tournament" at the University of Tennessee Knoxville / Downtown Gallery. We were grabbing a sushi special bite before our match against the indomitable Ed Cooper / Projexorcism and splendid Faze Exile on audio.

just for fun

An animated gif I made as an in-class demo for Video Art II, inspired by Terry Gilliam's Do It Yourself Animation Show.

Kiln and Convection Technology

Eighteen years ago during the spring of 1995 on a small island in the Mississippi River off the shores of St. Paul MN at an abandoned power plant a group of artists observed Beltane using the medium of fire.

Without knowing that Beltane translates as "fire of the god"(1), or 

that cakes played an important role in Beltane, or that one piece of cake would traditionally be marked and he who received it would be sacrificed to the fire...

         I cooked giant pancakes with a marble hidden inside.

Earlier in the day, I had dug a pit and assembled a stove with a sheet of salvaged stainless steel and some bricks.

Earlier in my life, I had unknowingly come to understand convection principles through observing my mom opening and closing the damper to control the heat of the kiln. When my giant pancake stove needed more heat, I intuitively pulled out a brick to create a heat transfer current that would stoke the fire thus raising the temperature of the cooking surface.

I used a snow shovel to flip the pancakes.

(1) Cormac derives the word Beltaine from the name of a god Bel, or Bil, and the Old Irish word tene, “fire.”

Ancient and Contemporary Mediums

This is Jackson Li (Li Jiansheng) director of the Sanbao Ceramic Institute and Museum (Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China) discussing characteristics of Minyao pottery traditions of present day China. Here he connects the personality of this pot to the work of ceramic artist Marie Woo, from whose collection it comes. Last weekend's Chinese Folk Pottery Symposium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art was the culmination of decades of Marie's research into the traditions of Chinese folk pottery. She has followed this quest deep into China numerous times to uncover the surviving practitioners of ancient ceramic vessel-building and firing techniques. For various reasons, industrialization is bringing about the end of these centuries-old traditions, creating an imperative to act quickly in regards to their study and documentation.

My mom is Marie Woo. Her ceramic art and research (in tandem with my father's architectural work) is the ground upon which my own art practice stands. I am humbled by the social and cultural history of clay as a material as I extend my reach in the studio with the contemporary digital tools of moving image art.