Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Brand new website (Update your bookmarks / rss readers)

Hello and hi there folks.

If you view my site at it's true url (http://www.anderwparnell.com), you’ve probably already noticed a drastic change to the look of the site. It was old, and in desperate need of an overhaul, so I did just that.

But if you're seeing this entry, you're most likely looking at my old blog, either at blogger, or through an rss reader.

The new urls are http://www.andrewparnell.com/blog for the blog. and feed://andrewparnell.com/feed/ for the rss feed.

For years I’ve been powering the blog side of things with a blogger account, and my portfolio was a handwritten xml database. Because of this the blog was well maintained, but the portfolio, which was the splash page to the site, became neglected pretty quickly.

There were also a lot of things about the way the portfolio was handled under the old site that I didn’t like, including that I didn’t provide a good way to link directly to individual entries, nor did I provide a good indicator of new content. Not that that was an issue, since I almost never updated it.

All these things have been addressed in the new site. I’ve ditched the lighbox portfolio gallery that was so popular when I built the old site, and opted for individual pages for each entry.

The newest portfolio entry is now being publicized on the header of the home page and blog, and the latest blog post is visible on the front page.

I’ve also switched from being blogger driven to WordPress. I never had a single complaint with blogger, but the way I was getting my data was more than a bit kludgy, pulling the blog content from an RSS feed, and reformatting it to fit my needs.

Moving to WordPress I’m giving up my worry free data backup, but I think it will be well worth it.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say on this topic. If you have any thoughts / feedback, I’d love to hear them.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Inspiration China - Opening Tonight.

Pectomoveo with ink


Inspiration China (Part of China Design Now Portland) opens tonight at 5 PM.

I went by yesterday and loaded Pectomoveo up with ink, and witnessed it put down its first set of lines, and I am absolutely in love with what it's doing. I'm so pleased and excited.

I'll see you there!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

New work, old work, and the October shows containing them.

Last month was just jam packed with work for me, prepping both old and new work for two shows I had opening this month.

Inspiration China

The show I made new work for this month is Inspiration China, part of China Design Now.

Responding to a 1000+ year old comb, I built a single axis CNC comb titled Pectomoveo, which mimics the gestural history of the comb by recording the movement as ink traces on paper.

Pectomoveo


The piece is laser cut out of wood, and operated by Arduino.

Pectomoveo at the White Box


UO's Allied Arts & Architecture's blog has some nice photos and a good article on the exhibit, which opens this Thursday, October 8th, 5-7pm, at The White Box, 24 NW First Avenue, Portland, OR.

This is going to be a great show, with a lot of great people in it, like my Maybe We Can cohorts Zach Rose*, Shawna X. Huang and Mackenzie Schubert.

Dorkbot at ON


The other show I have this month is part of the Dorkbot PDX group show at ON Gallery where I'm displaying Cardiolumen, which was my BFA Thesis Piece.

Cardiolumen @ Maybe We Can from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.



Using a heart rate monitor, an arduino, a servo motor, some gears and a dimmer switch, I am able to present the user's heart rate back to him, creating a meditative loop.

Cardiolumen at ON


Jason has some great pictures of the show up on his site. I tried to get some myself, but it was just too crowded. (Not that I'm complaining.)

*You can also see Zach Rose, and his heart beat, in the video of Cardiolumen @ Maybe We Can. That's right, cross promotion within one post.

Data and the Physical World

Hey folks,

Sorry to have gone radio silent for the entire month of September. I've got this folder of images I wanted to post about in September, but now that we're in October, I guess we'll just skip it. (If you follow me on twitter you got the highlights anyway.)

Back in June I got invited to speak at Dorkbot 0x03. It was...not the smoothest talk I've ever been part of, in part because I really rushed through it. But it was a great experience.

Anyway, I recently found out Jared posted the video of my talk, so I figured I might as well share it.

Andrew S. Parnell - Data and the Physical World from Jared Boone on Vimeo.



Enjoy.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Oh Maywa Denki



Seriously, lets just leave it at Maywa Denki, I <3 You.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Body Collective

I'm super loving this work from Second Story for Portland Art Museum's Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo exhibit.



Titled Body Collective, the piece lets visitors super impose art from the collection onto their own bodies, and then stores that image to be viewed by future visitors to the exhibit. It's super fun, and super beautiful.

...I like the word super today.



Go look at the rest of the documentation on Second Story's site. I think the videos do it the most justice.

The exhibit is running at the Portland Art Museum until September 7th. I'm going to check it out. If you're in/around Portland, you should too.

Thanks Nina for the alert.

Monday, July 27, 2009

The Maze Solving Algorithm

Maze Solving Algorithm from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.


The Maze Solving Algorithm is a bit more geographically limited than RPS, mostly because you need to be in a walled city (or can otherwise define some bounds that act as a maze wall.) Still, if you CAN use it, the results are wonderful.

In Siena I went from Porta Tufi to Porta Ramano which Google tells me should take about 21 minutes walking, but using the algorithm took closer to an hour. Let me tell you: it was a well spent hour. (Though, I couldn't help but feel frustrated when I realized 30 minutes in that I'd effectively moved one block.)