#wood

Spooning

/ PK Read / Leave a comment

The word spooning, used  in either of its two meanings (conveying food to one’s mouth via a spoon, or cuddling close with someone), implies a kind of physical intimacy.

Norwegian designer Stian Korntved Ruud offers a third meaning for spooning with his art project of carving a new spoon every day from a different kind of wood.

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

He sketches each new creation, then tries carving it out, and the process sometimes requires several iterations.

The work also requires the right tool for every kind of wood and spoon.

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

I guess it goes without saying that this 365-day project is being disseminated through social media, which offers a completely different kind of transient intimacy.

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud
Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

But I am drawn to the patience, determination and quiet commitment to the daily exploration of fresh solutions for a problem that has long since been thought solved:

The humble spoon.

Read more about the project here, visit Ruud’s studio here, and see the Daily Spoon here.

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

Artist: Stian Korntved Ruud

 

Tree Song

/ PK Read / Leave a comment
Photo: konzeptm

Photo: konzeptm

The sound of a forest is music to my ears, but there’s an artist who has taken that thought one literal step further and made music from wood. Specifically, Bartholomäus Traubeck has taken slices of trees and digitally converted the age rings into piano music.

From Traubeck’s web site:

“A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music.

“It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.”

The music doesn’t sound at all like the symphony I hear while out in the forest, and if trees really do speak to one another, I suspect this would sound to them like a foreign language. Still, it’s an interesting attempt at translation.