GASKETS | November 2007

Rob Giampietro is a principal at Giampietro+Smith, a design firm based in New York City. Rob is also an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design and RISD, and a contributor to Design Observer and Dot Dot Dot. Rob blogs at Lined & Unlined.

From the MS Encarta entry on the image:
Despite his mother’s beckoning, an infant hesitates to cross the “visual cliff” — an apparently steep drop that is actually covered by transparent glass. Psychologists in the 1960s found that most infants 6 to 14 months of age were reluctant to crawl over the cliff, suggesting they had the ability to perceive depth.

From Rob:
I guess the idea that interests me would be that even babies in the earliest stages of cognition have certain expectations about the physical properties of the world, and violating those expectations leaves them a bit dumbfounded, confused, trying to make sense of why the violation occurred. I also think the description of the experiments themselves, the ball rolling through the wall, the idea of crawling into thin air on the visual cliff - they're really visually evocative.

For more, check out this entry at Lined & Unlined.

Teddy : Want to give me a quick bio / explanation of the work ?

Joel : Nah, Just be like “blissed out crotch shot floor mat” courtesy of Joel Holmberg.

We're very lucky and excited to feature this background image from Marian Bantjes. If you don't know her work, you should.

From a much longer bio on her site:
Now I live on an island near Vancouver, BC. That’s on the west coast of Canada, across from Japan. This coast is rich and lush and green all year ‘round. It seldom snows here. We even have palm-tree-like-things. We have beaches and mountains and giant trees. It’s absolutely incredible and I’m very, very lucky to live here.
     I have a very big virtual life. In fact, most of my life these days seems to exist in the ether of the internet. I’m not that happy about this, but … I live on an island on the west coast of Canada, so, uh …

Download Marian Bantjes 14-Second Themesong by Gaskets.

Adam spends most of his day working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he gets to see nice things like this gravestone on his walk to the office. His other time is spent being one half of Shields and Squires, a design and development partnership with his cousin, Dan Shields. He likes chips.

There are products here for you.

And if you buy something from us, we'll send you one of these stickers, which look a little like psychedelic NYC subway signs, and, in all of their cyan-on-magenta glory, are more than a little hard to look at. Blind 'em.

Released in February 2006, this is our most recent full length album. Allmusic.com called it a “considerably less goofy affair” than Big Fun, with “more mature and thoughtful songwriting.” Thanks, Allmusic, I think. Hard copies are sold out until we decide to make more, but you can still get it on iTunes.

mp3 Downloads
Earthquake
A Movie About You
End Game

Loose Change Live is a full length film of the Gaskets's February 2006 Loose Change release show at the now-defunct Nanci Raygun in Richmond, Virginia. It was directed by Joe Carabeo, and features what was the only Gaskets performance with a full band, until its current line-up, of course.

Trailer after the jump.

"Loose Change Live" DVD - $10 (+ shipping)
The Gaskets concert film, directed by Joe Carabeo
12 live songs, plus music videos and more

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Live at Toad's Place in Richmond, Va, December 1 2007.
Doors: 7 pm. Show: 8 pm.

Toad's Place Richmond is located at 140 Virginia Street in Shockoe Slip (in the Lady Byrd Hat Building) near the banks of the James River along the Canal Walk and Turning Basin.

You folks in Richmond, it's your last chance to see us live with the new band in the year 2007, for whatever that's worth. The sound is great at this club, and we'll be followed by our good friend David Lowery, of course with his partner-in-crime Johnny Hickman and the rest of Cracker. This is going to be fun.

In 2003, Ross and I had just finished our first year of college and released this poppy, silly album which we are totally embarrassed of. Not everybody hates it as much as we do.

From Allmusic.com's 4-star review :
Big Fun sounds like a final project at the They Might be Giants fantasy camp. It's not, but Ted Blanks and Ross Harman -- known collectively as the Gaskets -- have made a record as wry, poppy, and naïve as such an assignment would need to be if it expected an A+. Working mainly with a jumble of drum machines and synthesizers (guitar and piano wink in the margins), the Gaskets build ditties infused with humor and melody ... [and] infuse every inch of their debut with enthusiasm and a jokey shuffle that's refreshingly genuine and entirely universal.

It's long out of print, and while we're not putting any more physical copies of it out there, you can still get it at the iTunes store.

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"This is a screengrab taken while messing around with a 3D program."

Grier Hillman Dill is a designer/animator/director currently working in New York City.

VIEW ORIGINAL

"Here is a favorite gif animation from my collection that makes absolutely no sense.  I found this gif in 2000 so who knows if it is even anywhere on the web anymore.  Vintage pre 9-11 shit."

Kevin Bewersdorf is an artist, musician, and CEO of GEAR T.E.K. Corporation.

From his website:

Hi! I'm Kevin. Within this website you will find some of my music, digital photos, electronic instruments, writing, and other projects. Nothing here has a copyright, so feel free to use the content however you like. I was born in 1980 and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. I graduated in 2004 from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in painting and I currently live in Austin Texas.

Thanks to this guy's flickr page, these are a few photos from our first show as a full band, or, as I like to call it, "band practice." It was a clear, breezy night, and they set us up outside the commons at VCU in Richmond, VA. I remember being particularly proud of everyone's outfit. Tony, our bassist, is always looking sharp in a blazer, and I asked Jamie to bring over his favorite accessory when he plays with Greenland: he wears feathers (or sometimes wheat) in his headband.

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"You know our work ... we mostly look for things and reuse.
This bg image may be our only original. We made it in 2003 for http://www.zombie-and-mummy.org/in/moscow.html episode."

From her Wikipedia entry:

Olia Lialina (b. May 4, 1971 in Moscow) is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator. Lialina studied film criticism at Moscow State University from where she graduated in 1993. She was one of the organisers and later, director of Cine Fantom, an experimental cinema club in Moscow founded in 1995 by Gleb Aleinikovm. Since 1999, she has worked and taught at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.

Be sure to read her fantastic new essay, Vernacular Web 2.