I actually did two things:

1) I finally put the images of the work I made in Budapest onto my website.   That’s  an important step in the artmaking process for me.  Seeing the work together, online, is a way for me to digest it differently than seeing it on the wall.  It also officially puts it “out there” (wherever that is) for others to see and comment on.

2) Also, and bigger and potentially better (yet all part of the same package), the universe collided in such a way so that today I found myself writing an email to Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR‘s (The International Group for Historic Airline Recovery) executive director in charge of leading yet another expedition to what is now called Nikumaroro Island (formerly Gardner).  I am writing to see if I can go along on the month-long expedition starting in May 2010 to search for DNA on the island that could lead to knowledge of Amelia Earhart’s whereabouts at the time of her death and a big “mystery solved” stamp on one of the most compelling enigmas in recent history.

Now if I get a response at all from this supremely busy man, that will be great.  If I get an affirmative response from him, that will be epic.  Then I can start the extensive grant writing process that will consume me for the next few months.  Thanks to NPR’s The World for featuring an interview with Ric Gillespie about the trip and my friend Brian Spolans for alerting me to this article from ABC News.  These two bits of media helped kick me in the butt to write the email.

In other news, when I finally bring all of this work together in an exhibition, I hope to make it somehow museum-like in appearance and presentation, as though I am presenting artifacts rather than artwork, or a hybridization of the two.  On this topic I just received this book in the mail today:

which I am very excited to read.  The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA presents fictions as though they are fact.  I am very compelled by this aesthetic of painstakingly contrived deceptions.  It is a historically rich, yet very current mode of presenting information.  I have witnessed this phenomenon in the writing of Ben Marcus, and the artwork of Hyungkoo Lee who’s work we saw at the Korean Pavilion during the 2007 Venice Biennale.  He creates realistic skeletal remains of cartoon characters.

Now, I am going to use all of this excited energy to head off to the studio!