Words about Brian and Kelli, by Sara Roberts
ethic, as in 'the ethic of their work is very distinct'.
distributed - in this reading group that brian and kelli and some other students had we were reading stuff about anarchy.We all brought articles, read and discussed them. something brian and kelli said finally connected the words 'distributed' and 'anarchy' for me, the relationship of anarchy to distributed. distributed, as in distributed computing, indicates a system where there is no primary source of control, things happen as the result of communication in a network of nodes. There is not one big central thing that broadcasts directions. there are lots of things, communicating with each other. (recently, in a meeting, I proposed 'distributed' as a characteristic that might help define 'new media' and realized how specialized a term distributed is....there was much indignant pointing-out that lots of new media work, installations for instance, had no method of distribution. these were film makers...) many things are distributed between computers... too few things in the material world. distributed is how more things would be if it were up to kelli and brian.
another great thing about anarchy that came from that group - i told lucky mosko, my friend and co-teacher, that we were reading about anarchy and he insisted that we absolutely must read "One Straw Revolution", a book by Masanobu Fukuoka, which is out of print. he lent me his tattered and stained copy. i started into it wondering what this book on organic gardening was going to have to do with anarchy. the book more or less has to do with everything, vividly.it has to do with brian and kelli, too. you can get it used on the internet - get it - it's worth whatever you pay.
tomatoes - kelli
and brian didn't have any place to plant tomatoes, so they were putting
them in pots, and they had three extra tomato plants that they gave us.
three little lop-leafed tomato plants, two kinds, some that looked
gathered at the top like stuffed purses, and some that came to a point,
like large hearts. they grew big and inside they had a paler whorl that
reminded you of a cloudy echocardiagram. The purses were extremely
numerous. They were fine tasting tomatoes and grew into amazing shapes
- a rhino tomato was a favorite. But the hearts were the best eating -
when sliced they were dense slabs of sweetness, a stack of thick red
tomato pancakes. The plants became monstrously large on an a-frame
built for them, a haystack of vines that loosed a flood of tomatoes
well into october.
brian and kelli's tomatoes didn't do so well in
the pots, they got fried early in the pasadena heat, fortunately making
brian and kelli a convenient destination for many of ours.
local - related to distributed. When things are distributed they can be local. If each McDonald's bought the meat for their burgers from local butchers, for instance, improving the surrounding economy, not having to ship, not having to preserve meat for shipment... would brian and kelli consider eating there?
orderly and organinized - my husband palle, whom brian has helped out on numerous projects, says that orderly and organized is the really remarkable thing about them - also efficient and minimalistic. "(sigh) so unlike us."
but not abstract, I wouldn't say that Kelli and Brian are more in love with the ideal than the real.
In an article in the New Yorker about the shaker aesthetic Adam Gopnick
quoted a book (by John T. Kirk) as saying that the shaker's minimalist
aesthetic hewed to the grid instead of the classical
prototype of design: the proportions of the human body. Flat grid
patterning, repetition, asymmetry; the Shakers made objects that follow
a numinous, non-human law of design.
there's a fair amount of the
grid in brian and kelli's work, too... floating there behind the eggs
and peaches and tomatoes and creatures.
orange juice - the smell of orange juice is linked inextricably to kelli and brian's work, they often made and served fresh orange juice at their shows at machine project.
kelli was taking care of their landlord's nine year old daughter sometimes and I saw her at the end of one day when she and her charge had made a pattern for, cut out, sewn, and stuffed a large stuffed creature. 'Taking care of kids is exhausting.", she said.
one day brian found a photocopy of a page from 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander that was left in the Integrated Media Lab. He came up to me and asked with uncharacteristic intensity "What book is this page from???" brian and kelli like it even better than I do, if that's possible.
brian and kadet and maybe adam and some other students had a group that met around the soldering iron one afternoon a week to work on each other's electronic projects. They were called, kind of mysteriously, 'the magic napkins'. I could be wrong but it occurred to me that brian might have named them from a story about a russian artist I sat next to at dinner, who after listening to an attempt to describe the obsessively complex computer project I was working on said, wonderingly, "that's so complicated...you know art can be as simple as... flipping over this napkin."
there was a wonderful, memorable, performance of brian's when he first made the creature with the long tentacles, and he came into the Roy O Disney Music Hall and knelt on the floor, cradling it while it made soft, unamplified noises, everyone crowding around and holding their breaths so that they could hear it.
prints - recently someone asked me why we don't have all those cool posters for the sound events anymore. Its because brian and kelli graduated. The ones they made survive, though, on walls in our offices and labs.
The most ubiquitous is the drum:
there were maybe 15 or 20 drums that appeared in a line on the wall in the hall, and they slowly dissappeared as people figured out that they were up for grabs. there's one over my desk, one in mark trayle's office... one in B303, the electronics lab... others are out there somewhere.
when kelli and brian moved from pasadena to philadelphia they brought us over three big bags of compost with nice red worms.