dear friends

I made this so that we can share thoughts and ideas, things were making, things we see/ hear/find. You guys are some of the smartest people I've ever met, and I want to keep communicating and collaborating with you.

Here's where I'm at:

I'm in Portland, OR with Cara and Elizabeth living at Josh Pavlacky and Zach Davis's house/alternative art space/gallery garage/studio, The Appendix, for the summer. Travis is here until the end of the week. We don't have jobs but we've been doing some yard work here and there and doing a lot of making.

Before I left Philadelphia I went to the Mutter Museum, a medical museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It houses a number of medical curiosities, including books bound from human skin by a creepy 19th century physician, a disgustingly large colon and the picture of the poor man it was removed from, a set of file drawers with categorized foreign objects removed from windpipes, an instrument developed before finger printing became standard criminal tracking practice used to measure the facial features of captured convicts, a million gross fetuses in jars, and a whole section dedicated to conjoined twins which I immediately became enraptured with. Downstairs there was a plaster post-mortem cast of the infamous "siamese twins" Chang and Eng, who are Omphalopagus conjoined twins-- they share a liver and are attached at the waist. The label beneath the case referenced two biography points: that together they sired over 21 children (they married a pair of sisters.....) and that apparently Eng was even tempered and mild, while Chang was a belligerent drunk.

There are a million more things to say about conjoined twins. This is one little animation sketch ( a work in progress), that i've been working on. I made this by animating the state changes (threshold) of live trace in Illustrator.




p.s The layout and blurb are a starting point. I'm open to any and all suggestions, and we can always continue to evolve it. The term cascus is from the relatively new field of landscape urbanism, something Josh Pavlacky has got us all hot and bothered about. Check out The Landscape Urbanism Reader...