street photography
(Holiday) At bottom is a stack of ‘stacks from over this year, in case you missed some; many have also been refined post-post, i.e. the Dick Cheney bit re: Cthulhu prompt in the Notes of the AI for an Eyesubstack.
But before that listicle, some silent “product placement”* shots: Balenciaga, Ferrari, Porsche, Enfants Riches Déprimés, iPhone, Anthropologie, Ford, Roger Dubuis, Winners.
SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES (AND SUBSCRIBE) HERE: K.I.A. SUBSTACK
TL; DR: Taylor Swift Dance Party participants, in polygons (PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)
I hear shrieks outside. It’s early evening, spring. Shouts, cries, and loud exclamations in big cities are alarming… but in rare cases, like this, they are joyous — the sounds from down below The Window are emanating from a flock of Swifties, in line for a Taylor Swift Dance Party. They are laughing loudly, and eager to shake it (off).
According to statistics, there are about a shibillion Swift fans worldwide. Here are a few of them — sequinned, blue-jeaned, braided, cowboy’d, lumberjacked — free-range, in their various geometries:
SEE THE REST OF THE PHOTOS AND SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTACK click> HERE
IMAGES:
heXXagram
acute triangle
90,100, 60, 120 degrees of swifties
quadrilateral non-parallelogram with purses
biPhonic right angle
15 degrees ensequinned
theoretical investigations on geometrical structures of swiftie clusters
Geometries and glyphs of fans and fame, and the infinite mystery and magic of celebrity — Taylor’s a symbol, or sigil, for positivity, that’s why the lineup.
I go downstairs and join it.
love vector
I shriek a little (but joyously).
The Window w/ Swifties Geometries
NOTES:
-“Siri, Siri, in my hand, who is the famous-est in the land?”
“Taylor Swift, Of Course, is the famous-est in the land. There were 10,751,000 searches for her on Google this month, twice as many as the next famous-est, Ronaldo.”
- in the pic w/the pink cowboy hats, if you could “enhance enhance enhance” (as they do in movies) the girl’s iPhone image on the right, you’d see me leaning out the topmost window, 25’ above, taking photos. The only person to actually notice my actions was the girl who gave me the peace sign.
-The Window (all images in the photo series 24/7/365. from the one window) is mostly about interconnections across single images over a span of time. This post is one of the few showing multiple photos of a single moment (others were of a shooting, and a fire; while How Far the Man and UHaul Psalm were multiples of a single subject, but across a span of time.)
-the panoramic photo shows a few people in the lumberjack phase
-re: Google AI debacle, I queried it to generate images of a Swiftie & it made this:
-apparently the next Taylor Swift album “The Tortured Poets Department” comes out April 19 2024. So I asked Chatgpt to write a tortured haiku using Swift song titles, and it gave me this: Endgame without you / Haunted by blank space, lost love / Teardrops on my guitar
TL; DR: serendipitous scenes for imagined movies (The Window pt 46)
An animé character escapes from her simplistic cartoon into the real world to see a rainbow, fall in love, have sex, fart, and sword fight, not necessarily in that order, before she gets rewritten.
After a simple pitch goes horribly wrong, the surviving salesmen begin to suspect that one of them faked their Six Sigma sales-course certificate.
MORE — SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES FOR THE BELOW AT K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE: LINK
An influencer unwittingly records a murder in the window behind her and has to outsmart the criminals, the cops, the CIA, and social media to stay alive and get a brand sponsorship…
The motorbike. The heist. The woman. The betrayal. The chase. The roadblock. The discussion about Plato’s cave, simulation theory, and whether AI-generated virtual realities should be pre-decolonized by large language models rewriting user requests. The shootout. The end….
With a murder about to occur in the fishnet industry, six undercover policemen — one Black, one Indigenous, one white, one South Asian, four Women, two LGBTQ2SIA+, one Questioning, one and a half Deaf, and two from Quebec, one of them a curve model and the other Muslim — investigate.
Time-tourists travel back from the far future in their Chronobago only to find they are tiny in size compared to 21st century humans, and are also parked illegally. After their argument with the traffic cop goes viral on WorldStarHipHop, they must evade competing oligarchs muscling them to start a podcast, do a terrarium residency in Vegas, use their tiny hands in artisanal cobalt mines, and/or tell them how much Bitcoin is going to be worth in two years, not necessarily in that order, all before their impounded temporal recreational vehicle is sold off at a police auction, stranding them hundreds of years from home.
LL Cool J’s elite NSA vampire SEAL team secretly reunites to stop a shadowy cabal of NWO WEF scientists from using AI to hijack the CERN collider in order to flatten the Earth into a 15 minute city, but first they must trace some NFTs back to ISIS, battle UN undeads, avoid NASA NPCs, and race to stay ahead of international sunrises.*
An unemployed and depressed android comes to Earth to find work at Chick-fil-A, win at Chemin de Fer, and take up capoeira — oh, and stop the apocalypse with his rabo de arraia.
A man lives with no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,** necessarily in that order.
The angel Raguel comes to Earth to decide The End and sees that things are pretty good actually compared to every other era ever, so flies back to heaven.
NOTES:
-*Rotten Tomatoes review by RoyalWee2 for Vampires VS: IV — 🍅 “Good, but not spectacular enough, nor intimate enough, to really impress us. We get fatigued (although it is LL’s most relatable performance since episode 133 of NCIS: Hawai’i)”
-** from Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan, 1651 (not coming soon to a theatre near you)
-for the international readers, the equation for Chronobago is: Time + Winnebago
-”Chemin de Fer” is a form of the gambling game baccarat, which is also known as punto banco; coincidently, all three have been used as nom de queere on Rupaul’s Drag Race; two by contestants, and one by a judge (Punto Banco.) “Rabo de arraia” is a capoeira kick, inverted and over the head, like a stingray’s strike. It was not used as a pseudonym on Drag Race. (It was used in “Pose” season 3 for a side character).
-good news: because the film has been pre-decolonized, the Academy has awarded the “Untitled Fishnet Crime” movie a 2025 Oscar
-”The chase. The desert. The shack. The girl. The roadblock. The end.” is the famous tagline on the original movie poster for the 1971 film Vanishing Point
-The angel. The descent. The judgement. The end.
-as always, all the photos are of real people caught in candid moments as they walk by The Window, (with no photoshopping, just color adjustments), and are the art, with the words (these words) always subordinate — especially when they are humorous. or "humorous”. (See the “How Far the Man” post for something more serious. Or “serious”.)
-the inspiration for this post came after seeing the above be-suited business guys walking just like:
Bonus image: (pinch up to magnify the billing block easter eggs):
The end.
TL; DR: A pairing of enigmatic images of couples from The Window project, third one at bottom.
Pairings, juxtapositions and patterns. Across the time span of The Window series (LINK), context emerges which generates (accretes?) considerations beyond each individual image.
Two photos taken months apart, at different times of day, of different situations, when juxtaposed within the context of an exhbition (virtual or institutional), suddenly obtain more layers of meaning.
For example in the project there is a photo of a woman in high heels and fur at 11 p.m., arms outstretched, smiling and posing for a photo as she leans back against a stretch limo. Months later I captured an image of a woman at 6 a.m crammed into a kid’s bike trailer, immobile (sleeping, sick, dead?), as her partner cycled from dumpster to dumpster looking for bottles.
Placed side by side, each image becomes a tuning fork that resonates to the other.
Another example: separate shots over months of 3 different groups of 3 women crossing the street together. Each group is ethnically homogenous and of the same age within their triplet, but when the photos are placed sequentially you notice that each group’s pattern of walking is significantly different — one group is close, almost shoulder to shoulder, arms and legs in synch; the next group somewhat matching in stride and arm movements, but a little farther apart from each other; and the last group of three is dispersed and with no physical cohesion of motion. Is it culture, age, season, setting, time of day, or happenstance that causes this phenomena?
One of the images by itself is just a word, but the three together are a poem.
New section, or themed grouping, in the ginormous 24/7/365/1 photo project The Window by K.I.A.: Section 10 - Vignettes. These images hit at a bigger story happening beyond the borders of the photo — a shooting, a protest, a wedding, a riot, Drake, and Taylor Swift (ies)... (Many — most — of the images in the project are portraits showing the diversity, velocity, hilarity, vanity, complexity, eccentricity (etc) of the modern city in the 21st century. SEE VIGNETTES HERE. (Individual and compilation images available as signed editioned prints.)
