Saturday, September 22, 2007

Thank god for Free Geek

It finally got to me, all those half-functioning monitors, broken UPS's, ancient computers/laptops, all sitting around in the 'family room'. And when I got the new printer a couple weeks ago, it became a crisis...where oh where would I put the HP Laserjet 4M Plus if I want to keep it around still?

So off they went to Free Geek, a most fabulous resource here in Portland. They take in old computer equipment, refurbish it (or recycle it, cannibalize it), and for x amount of volunteer hours, you get to take home a piece of refurbished equipment.

So I met with Josephine today for the Asian Reporter article. We've met several times before and have chatted for various projects or other, so it was an easy couple of hours. We talked about my recently finished pieces and also the memory loss project that I'm starting. Showed her the experiments that I'm working on with the tulle for the Tennessee show next year. Which, btw, is turning out to be a bit of trouble -- the cut edges of the tulle want to stick to each other, and when you lift up one 'page', the next page comes up with it. I'll need to finish the edges somehow so that they don't stick, maybe coating it with a light coat of gel medium or something. Or maybe finish the edges with bias tape...ooooh, that might work -- make the bias tape with old fabric. I'm liking this idea. I'm just thinking about this as I type, obviously. That would also make it much easier to register; and to bind the pages together, I can bind the fabric edges together at the spine, I can even use a traditional book binding stitch to do that! Oooh...

This is a good idea on another front -- my iron is saved from further abuse. I was using the iron to try to fuse the raw edges this afternoon, and that was not working out so well.

Went to the Portland Taiko concert tonight. My favorite piece, by far, was a piece done using paper as percussion. This is not paper mounted on drums, but just the sounds paper makes when folded, unfolded, slapped against itself, slapped against your hands and other surfaces, and waved around in the air. Very interesting piece.

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