Added on by Cole Pierce.
The infinitely reproducible item collides with obsolescence, leaving an emptiness that I associatively compare to the point past comprehension. 

Found Answering Machine Tape

Added on by Cole Pierce.

I digitized a portion of this tape I found in the attic of a house I had a studio in (Colfax).  There is one message but the majority of the 20 minute recording is noise, cracks and creaks.  I might use it as part of an art installation in the future, but don't have any real plans yet. Download a high quality 243 mb AIFF recording of the tape here . Or a 27 mb MP3 here. 

Art Collecting, I own ten countries

Added on by Cole Pierce.

I recently acquired ten sculptures of countries through an art trade with Chicago based artist and collector Ben Foch. Read about his project The World in this Proximity article. In short, Ben made a sculpture of every country and priced them according to their GDP value (1 USD to 1 Billion GDP/PPP). The piece was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in January of 2009. I traded my series of triangle paintings that I showed at Old Gold last November. When I was initially trying to decide which countries I wanted to own, I had no idea what strategy to use. I looked for a continent, but there was not one intact due to previous sales. I considered picking countries that I thought were cool, or had interesting music scenes happening, but Iceland was taken and Sweden and Norway are ugly. I almost chose every country in the southern 30 - 45 latitude region. Instead, I picked countries for formal reasons, their size and shape and sexy curves.





Selection of Ben Foch's The World, 2009
Installation View, my living room.

Pakistan and New Zealand
Chile
Myanmar

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Added on by Cole Pierce.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP

I did not allow my resolution, with respect to the Parliamentary Debates, to cool. It was one of the irons I began to heat immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at, with a perseverance I may honestly admire. I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, throught these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyption Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expecation, and that a pen and ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking.

pp 444-445