screen printing...

holler.

i'm back to being a terrible blogger.

screen printing t-shirts of John's pre-op scoliosis back x-ray.

i guess it's a surprise for him. his sister is a hell of a schemer and i'm always down when x-rays are involved. i'll post t-shirt and poster pics once the bad boys are printed.

in the meantime here is a image i made with john and his x-ray...

hmmm, what else...

messing with ideas for Lake Inferior cover. contrast anyone?

bird man scrilla

[click for full size]

fly home little friend.

haha.

i don't know if i like this.

so this is my first real foray into animation,

unfortunately it had to be done in photoshop [wtf! right?]

fortunately it was pretty easy once i figured some kinks out. photoshop just has lots of limitations as it is not made for animation. this is loosely based on the hindenberg disaster of 1937. i added random stuff and my own morbid twist.

definitely my first animation though,
i think i will practice and make some better ones.

fuck school man.

i just want to travel and take pictures.

image that i may use in my Experience Book

kyle blue

poster credit Silas Munro

Kyle Blue from Dwell Magazine is visiting the studio and doing a lecture right now.

We just talked about how Dakota and I like dinosaurs. There are at least 5 on my studio desk right now.

Fia BackstrÖm:

"Kiss my Ass!" and other Revolutionary Relations in Art Education

How about this classic relationship between the student and the teacher? A most intricate dance of power and disavowal set in contradictory motions. From the perspective of the teacher:

- Offering valuable statements, while making sure that no one takes them for truth
- Taking on the role of authority, while harboring a secret wish to be overthrown
- Secretly encouraging disobedience, while always veiling that desire in covert comments

In this confusing array of resistance and consensus; who am I to distinguish between a valid, and a non-serving revolt? In the art of negotiating between student and teacher, these are the issues to be continually re-visited. The relationships at stake stretch further than the classroom encounter, self-reflexively to our possible positions as prosumers and content providers, as participants in the system.

Students are asking for permission in this new suspicious, professional, kiss ass manner. This inverted transference; a refusal to overthrow, resistance as in yes please and much more, so kiss my ass or you'll be thrown out of class. The Sex Pistols generation is long time gone, now it is face book networking and fitting in, every revolt a stylish, well-behaved opportunity too pleasing to stage.

Breaking the law - or simply a loser?

Teaching how to conceive art - what an oxymoron! Since the romantic era artists have rarely been sanctioned for good behavior, nor for obedience to authority, and if rewards were granted it was rather for brilliant noncompliance. Within the art educational institution of grades, grants and nepotistic favors, this basis for evaluation clearly stirs a conundrum. If the rules are there to be broken, and are considered counter to our understanding of what art could be, how can one operate critically towards a system, which one is paying large sums to be part of, and which is to grade one's performance? Inversely, how can one take on the guise of authority for this very system, while planting a fertile ground for one's own dismissal? As we all know, a revolution cannot be given away, power has to be seized.

Sister Corita Kent gained international fame for her engaging screen-prints during the 1960s and 1970s. She ran the Art Department at the Immaculate Heart College until 1968, where she expanded screen-printing activities into blooming happenings. Her ten legendary golden rules for education covers ideas from setting up an environment of trust and creativity, promoting a flow of inspiration and joy, while underlining work ethics with the importance of hard work. Her last rule - number #10 - most appropriately asserts that we ought to break all prior rules including our own in an unknown abstract manner, to be re-invented each time it is to be done. By avoiding prefabricated revolutionary recipes, an ongoing, breathing engagement for an activist position can be fostered.

Contrary to ideas of the competitive individualistic artist of closed authorship, Corita's central emphasis was a mutual exchange of knowledge between students and teacher, where she illuminatingly positions generosity as the pivotal energy. This approach levels the hierarchical educational structures, and knowledge becomes a subjective flow between the shared experience of the teacher's vaster one, and the student's access to a more current and contemporary experience. It is not in the level of sophistication of the material or text, but it is in the format of the presentation (of which the teacher is in charge) that determines what can be digested, re-interpreted, or even misunderstood. The confusion of a student's perception and conception ought to be a primary incitement in this meeting of perpetual wagering.

Close to the learning process of exchange is the process of psychoanalytic therapy; the decease being the core issue around which the student's work evolves, - commonly called "IT" - and the symptoms being the work presented. In vain would the therapist/teacher diagnose and advise a cure for the disease, instead the symptoms are used to provoke and lure the disease to show itself. Through the symptoms the patient-student in the educational state projects into the future, using transference, and the questions have to be asked over and over and over as the only tool, with the hope to get a hold and set it bouncing around the room. In the end, who is guiding whom? The teacher, like grand-ma, slightly outdated and out of touch with the new. The student-patient cannot be served, but can take initiative and lead the way. No group in society was ever given freedom, it has had to be stolen. Students have to demand a valuable experience. Worse than biting the apple, would be to accept limits from within in the pursuit of knowledge?

Are you productive little friend?

This is the title of a painting by Swedish artist Peter Tillberg from 1976, a gloomy schoolroom with rows of obedient conformist young students. Though our classrooms may look less gloomy, in both cases the ideological framework of the educational decisions are taken for granted; questions on efficiency are left un-raised. With soaring educational costs, demands on expectations of productivity and prospect profitable outcome of a student are realistic and viable. In the context of art education, these societal demands raise questions such as:

- How to measure a student's progression, (grading)?
- How to measure the productivity and value of a student's contributions?
- How to measure education where particular knowledge may surface years after graduation?
- How will their achievements be viable and continue into the future?

Often students who find their way early on to an to an "IT", in the form of well-defined statement, will close out early. What looks like academic success turns into a circus schtick. We expect students to write their artist statements, encouraged towards the highway of profit, which often come to equal one-dimensional work, with flat explanations in one liner slogans for simple consensual work. How can one encourage lies and tricksters; a fictional account; dancing like Mohammed Ali, to continual defiance. The sadness of the artist realizing what she is doing just to loose the unexpected turns in the work, who instead of searching for a suitable format, ought to consider any articulation as a potential exclamation.

Corita's sixth rule states: "Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make." Everything was to be considered an experiment, and the students were dissuaded from analyzing and creating simultaneously, as these were considered to interfere. The split between creating and analysis drives towards the much bigger mistake within art education of dividing crafts and conceptual work as two distinct species, rendering criticality part of a decorative tradition. The borders ought to be kept fluid; asking questions can be creating in James Lee Byars' sense, where questions were turned into an art form. From the making we know they are two sides of one.

Training for productive failure is a challenge to parody! How can tolerance of failure be prepared for, or how can one encourage students to profit from the accident? In this world of total exploitation, we plan to be safe for any occurrence, even the uncontrollable ones. Where is the space for the loser, the less successful and the blatantly flawed? In Reggio Emilia, a northern Italian city with a kindergarten pedagogy developed by the same name, the work of the children is not geared towards productivity, but along the pace of the individual child. Questions are asked with no immediate response expected in this form of anti-teaching.

A goal-oriented world of smooth individuals is contradictory to what art can be and to what we are. Going backwards and forwards simultaneously with periods of unpredictable trying, taking risks, and opening up for chance, like an improvisational jazz musician in tune with his surrounding environment, teaching in reverse, of continual failing and succeeding then moving on in a non-streamlined process.

The new old : new spatiality : new communality

Looking for new ways of engaging, with a shifted authorship for the new individual. Past the top to bottom spatial metaphors of the master narratives of the 20th century (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) our lives networked, bookmarked and hyperlinked through Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, like double agents, in all places at once. The spatial image of a bourgeois two-storey house outdated. The belief in the inherent goodness of collaboration in the name of community, democracy, and flat organizations, consensually veiling differences of opinion and liability in a state of dependence. This symbiotic grey-zone functions like a hidden soft kind of totalitarianism. Today's content producer is far from yesterday's photo-journalist; being beyond collaboration, a business artist married to the entertainment industry and the culture of happiness. To think space and the individual around new terms, one who is taking pleasure in exchange and doing action, leading us beyond utopia towards a future un-authored, generous environment, in which we have a say.

How bad is it?

In the new economy with an anything goes attitude, the ideological values supporting what art can be need to be excavated, and set against a stage of general suspicion. How can one talk about a body of work without implementing industrial standards? How can one ask for pieces without asking for products? How can one negate craft without implying a slave economy of the one's who are producing it for you? Where does one draw an epistemological line between so called immaterial art, speculative bonds and off-shore constructions? Bad work as bad taste as in aesthetic evaluation for the home decorators to decide, next collection exchangeable for even hotter procedures? How can an education sustain itself over time, when seasonal fashions direct the values to be taught? What are they training for - turning hamburgers at Mac Donalds or encouraged in the production, shuffling and trafficking of images, both equally productive for our society? Rather than producing pre-fabricated values and presentations, the question of why making an image at all needs to be explored, keeping in mind: "Image coming soon!".

Today again no apples!

published in: Dear Dave, Summer 2008"

interesting.

also,

dicking with some logo work.




very, very rough explorations.

i love futura.

___________________________________________________________

and david evans came and talked yesterday at school

nat'l geo bastard....

check him out:

www.davidevansimages.com

still though, he gets paid to fight off dysentery and walk amongst landmines. i pay money to do that shit during the summer.

The Invisible Dictionary

above are two iterations of posters based around the social practices associated with the dictionary. basically i went with a contrast of the physical [book] dictionary and the ubiquitous dictionary [the one in your mobile or web browser or google search bar].

The blue and yellow pair were what i used in the final critique and were completed a week after the two that are dripping with cooper. I am still very much in love with the bottom pair and was coerced into changing them [greatly] by a professor who doesn't like cooper. The real argument was that the final would need copy and "it would be hard to establish a hierarchy using a font like cooper..." because whereas something like futura has medium, black, condensed etc, cooper has black and italic.

holler.

Dear Little Brother,

I have three girlfriends for you Little Brother.

I don't think you know them, but you should. They are old favorites of mine.

You need some lady friends that play with cameras as much as you do.

First there is Cindy. She was doing the emo myspace pictures before there was a myspace.


Next is Barbara. She won't play nature to your culture. I know how you like feminists Little Brother.

photo collage! futura typeface!! red, black, white!!!

hell, even i copied her style for a project...

And lastly there is Nan. She might be a little more grunge than you can handle.

raw

Get your camera and call me Little Brother. Tell me how your dates go.

donezo

prints are done.

huzzah.

progress and experimentation

hand drawn idea for poster. contrast, blah blah blah. not using that type, and the red box is a stand in for either a photograph or a better hand drawn dictionary.

idea of contrasting social practices of ubiquitous dictionary [electronic] with physical dictionary [book]

experimentation with texture and finding a place to lay down some copy.

experimenting with title

experimenting with copy

These are going to be for a bus station and are adverts for "The Story of Everyday Objects" at the Smithsonian Museum of American History from Nov. - Dec. Yay. I am experimenting with hand drawn stuff and collage.

Studio Dumbar
Rambow
Rodchenko

Yeehaw.

Space Cadet Sayles out.

rebus [?] , appropriate [?]

"ha ha"

get it?

Dictionary Timeline

Ah, the beloved timeline...

small and probably blurry.
you get the gist...

More Adverts

My imaging prof sent us a link to a blog with these images, but i had to post the best ones. Enjoy...

more junk

Du Pont; 1955 (i think)

Kool; 1982

Mattel; 1982

Hawaii Visitors Bureau; 1955

These are all images I'm using for a current project. I gotta ad-bust 3 of them. In the meantime though, dig on these little gems.

___________________________________________________________________

another sick vector drawing. fun.
ts-80, one of the first pc's with an onboard dictionary.

yeehaw. burn on.

Fuck, it's cmyk...

[THE STRENGTH OF GODZILLA!]
[THE FINEST IN JAPANESE TECHNOLOGY!]

so, this is actually purple, but i'm too lazy to resave it as rgb. it's for a timeline i'm doing on The Dictionary.

The first handheld electronic dictionary was made in 1979 in Japan.

The first predictive text programs were being used as early as 1971, text messages didn't hit the public till 1995.

The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was fully digitized by 120 keyboarders, had 350,000,000 characters and needed 55 proof readers.


i did this instead of working on my timeline...

...off to jackpot.

so, this is my final concept map. small i know, you can def read all the details with a microscope though.

Tableau

Tableau image for my imaging class.
I think this is the one edited for the crap printers, thats why the low values are so not black....

I will say that I'm not unhappy with it.

heart was always my least favorite power on Captain Planet.

experimentation for an imaging project that i'm stewing on extra hard.

rather grainy; could be low shutter speed or time for a newer camera.

[digital projection on sitter (stand-er?)]

Beginnings of Dictionary Concept Map

I wish it was bigger. 

Nice crit today, but this is soooooooooo in its infancy.

See you later.

thug lyfe.

So maybe using this in a larger pattern with lots of reflections and bicycles and assholes?

Ralph

1. Back in Ralph
2. Jackpot
3. Graphic design attacks return
4. Chaimberlan is now Chinatown
5. UpperWestSide t-shirts need to get done
6. Double Stuff Oreos
7. The Budos Band
8. this list is going nowhere fast.
   

Final Prep

So. Here I am back in Saigon.

After a few nights in Dalat, we scooted to the coast on a bus towards a place called Muine (Mui`-Nay). Muine was a beach town, one long strip of road and a ton of hotels and places to eat food, rent surfing equipment (of the wind variety) and buy extremely cheesy hats. Vietnamese are crazy for wearing cheesy hats. I just can't bring myself to wearing a hat like that hawaiian punch lush...

Anyway, it was low season in Muine, meaning it was relatively devoid of human life, save for the few backpackers running through to take $300 kitesurfing lessons and 50-70 year-old Aussie couples. Also there were alot of electricity issues. Most of the time if we would get lunch somewhere the waiter would seat us and then dissapear. We would hear a generator begin to roar and then bad music and fans blowing. Muine was relaxing for the most part, but a non-AC room and no nightlife combined with a jellyfish/algae bloom made it significantly less entertaining.

So, it is my last full day in Saigon (where we arrived last night) and I am compiling a list of shit I need to get/do. We'll see if my wallet can handle it....:

1. One liter of Cobra Wine
2. One kilo of Saigon tobacco
3. One carton of Vinataba Cigarettes as promised for one E. Sauvain
4. A large North Face backpack, non-counterfit
5. Assorted family gifts
6. Write 4 letters
7. Aquire 3 more pairs of Ray-Bans
8. Go to Dung's bar tonight so he and the girls can give us a promised send off
9. Get back to North America

Until then.

Jesus H Christ

So, I'm still in Dalat.
Which is going down as one of my favorites.

Yesterday we woke, and after a brief breakfast met our guide Nam, rented another moto and blasted through the countryside. We stopped at an abandoned airstrip and some greenhouses and stuff, and while heading to a waterfall, Nam yells, "You like rice wine?"

For fuck sake man. 10:30 in the AM and we basically stop at a dude's house because he is running the equivalent of a moonshine distillery in his house. He made us (well, me) drink like a triple shot of the nastiest, warmest, most vile rice shit ever.

Ladies and gentleman, we have liftoff.

Rett tasted it, but basically refused anymore. At this point in the morning he was flying solo on the bike and I was Nam's bitch, so I don't blame him. We hopped back on the bikes and did some more riding, checked out some other shit, most notably a massive waterfall, and then stopped in the middle of nowhere for some pho (fuh) for lunch.

Another note on Vietnam: People are really into "medicine", but when I say medicine i'm not meaning stuff that actually good for you. I'm meaning, when we walk into this ladies house for lunch, there are big glass containers with a thick brown liquid and all kinds of shit floating (or sinking) in it. It's not uncommon for it to be full of snakes, scorpions, other assorted animals, herbs, treebarks, probably dirt too.

After a long conversation on the merits of snake liver, and good discussion on how nice snake blood smells, Nam insisted on us having shots of this medicine shite. Thing is, he poured two, not three shots of it. This says alot when the local won't even touch the nasty stuff that he swears by.

All I will say is that he made us have another shot afterwards, apparently my "this is disgusting" face translates in Vietnamese as "damn, I am cured!"

We continued riding, this time I was driving solo, toothpick secured in my teeth and white wayfarers strapped to my face, and secretly praying that the medicine wouldn't put me in Bat Country. After getting back to the hotel I had a beer and talked some more with Nam. He flew helicopters for the South during the war. I took his picture.

Later that night Rett and I did some exploring. A backpacker, the sort who clutches a lonely planet guide while he looks and the ground and kicks grit in the street, told us that Dalat was vacant of late night happening and we wanted to prove the Aussie bastard wrong. By 11pm though, things were looking pretty dim. I wanted to pass out, but Rett man attacked with the positive peer pressure that I was warned of in the DARE program and we went to one more bar.

Like the other ones we had stopped by, it was practically deserted. There was a 46 year old dude from Newcastle though.

Phil had started thinking long and hard about his midlife crisis. Before becoming firmly ensnared in it and cheating on his girlfriend or buying a sportscar, he broke up with the girl, told his manager to fuck off, sold his house and has been traveling all around Asia.

We closed the bar with Phil and then decided to look for more trouble near the city market. Upon arrival it appeared that most of the people were cleaning up their stuff, but we stopped at one stall where there was a table of old Vietnamese guys and ordered three beers. As is usual for me in Asia, after a minute or so I started getting stares from the locals and shouted hello at them. It is really fun to catch people staring at you and make an awful face at them and keep staring.

It started.

"Where you from?" etc. Eventually they were handing us shots across the table of cursid Hanoi Vodka. Hanoi Vodka that is good for sanitizing things, fueling your car, curing ear infections, not drinking. Then they put a huge plate of meat on our table. It was tasty, because I was drunk, but was tough and cartilagey. After a few bites I realize that the one dude is grinning at me, he slurred some Vietnamese and then pointed at his tongue. "Oh, yeah! Delicious! Tastes good!" I said. Then I realized he meant that we were eating tongue, great.

So, 1am finds me quite well. I am sitting in a nearly abandoned street market with a table of 8 drunk Vietnamese men, Rett, a drunken 46 year old Englishman, watching some teenagers smash a kid's head against a steel door, eating cow tongue and drinking more shots of the poison.

I guess it's tradition in Vietnam, they are very nice people and even nicer drunks. If your glass is looking low, they will top it. If your are spacing out, the bastards will shove a shot in your face. This happened until the bottle was empty. Then Rett decided that we should show them up and retaliate. He vanishes for a bit and I try to communicate some more. One guy is a taxi driver, he is drunker and more obnoxious then the other guys, he wants to take me somewhere, presumably a brothel, and keeps making hand gestures that surely represent dirty hooker sex. Great. Another guy across from me is a sculptor. I told him I was a graphic designer. No comprende. I told him I was an artist. This he understood.

Then Rett shows up with another bottle of this Hanoi Vodka shit. The plan was to pour shots for all of these guys, but what happened instead was that for every shot we poured for the old dudes, the three white guys had to have a shot as well.

I think this worked out to maybe a total of 8 to 10 shots for me. Somehow we got home.

So, the moral of this story is...

There is no moral. Motorbikes, bad medicine, Hanoi Vodka and tongue will dehydrate you.

Here I am, typing this shit. I just had breakfast and sat next to a baby all morning.

Space Cadet Sayles ending transmission.

Dalat

I'm in Dalat.

It's fucking awesome (70F), there was no war here, it is mountainous and sweatshirtable, tomorrow I am getting on a motorcycle and driving around the country side.

I have a card reader here!

It only takes 10 minutes to upload a photo.

Fuck

That.

Saigon Says

Hey guys.

Or by guys I mean the three people that consistently check the blog that I never post on.

What a cliche start to any blog ever. Fuck.


Well, Here I am in Saigon. It's been nice here, monsoonal rains and humidity. I stayed in Can Tho last night, which is a chill town on the Mekong. Ate lots of elephant ear fish and woke at 5am this morning to take a boat out to a floating market. The delta is really cool. Each boat sells something different and they each have bamboo poles with the product stuck on top. So, for instance, a long boat overflowing with pineapple will have a big ass stick with a pineapple stuck on it.

It's weird to watch the people, they live their whole lives on boats. I couldn't deal with being damp (dank, lol) my entire life.

At least they eat well.

Couple days in Saigon, then Asshole, Miller and Expo go home and me and Rett-Man go to Dalat and some other undecided places by Jeep. Yay.
____________________________________________________________________

Also.
If you know Jane Wilson you should email her. She starts radiation soon, I don't know many details as I am 13,000 miles away.

Email me for her address.
____________________________________________________________________

Maybe by the end of this trek I will find somewhere with internet that is worth a shit and a nice, hot Australian girl with a camera cord.

Until then, imagine.

Drinking and Cycling

Well, I was going to be crafty and post pictures and witty comments with the occasional anecdote.

This trip has found Viet Nam's internet situation to be less than hospitable. I am moving down the coast though and making my way south, so more posting may be possible.

Also, I am lacking a camera cable, so are the other 5 people I am traveling with that own cameras. fuck.

I am in Hue, Viet Nam right now. It is in the middle of the country along the perfume river was the capital ages ago. It is a college town and definitely on the backpacker trail, but a nice break after an overnighter on the train to Dong Ha and two days in the DMZ.

Last night as the compadres and I made our way out of the Why Not bar, which we totally closed (the bar tenders were all falling asleep on the bar and getting mad at us), we helped them close up by carrying chairs and shit inside. Then some drunk cyclo (rickshaw driver) was trying to get us to ride with him. I told him he should let me drive his cyclo and that the bastard should pay me 50,000VND ($3ish) and he agreed, only he didnt get in, Carson did. I immedietly peddled away and zig zagged down the street with the boys and the Vietnamese dude in tow. I totally stole this guys rig which, by the way, was totally a fixxy and had no real brakes, there was some thing i could pull which was supposed to stop the back wheel but it didn't do shit. Not that breaks are necessary anyway, "who needs brakes when you can go faster?" right?

As we got close to the hotel I figured i could cut the bike really hard and use the rigid metal motorbike ramps to get over the curb and into the driveway.

crash.

not too hard, i stayed on the bike ok, Carson was jarred and proceeded to bitch about it the next day, but we hopped off the bike as the guys caught up.

the cyclo guy spattered in broken engrish, "You pay me naaaaaw, feeedee tousan dong." I said, "fuck that!" which i was later informed sounded more like "fuck thaaahhhh mumble mumble mumble." We all roared with laughter and entered the hotel and crashed for the night.

yay bicycles.

euro cup final tonight.

Why Not?

viet nam

hi kids.
i'm here
i'm safe.
yvonne townsley just gave me the mom garb.

2 minutes before we are leaving hanoi for ha long bay.

i will make a real post when i actually have time to sit down and am not be guilted at.

i am alive.
laters.

Transcontinental

I'm leaving in a few days for a month or more.


I'm hanging out with old friends.


Contact Information:
Hanoi: Galaxy: (+84) 4 828 2888

Halong: Huong Hai Junk

Night Train: Unification Express: (Soft AC sleepers; 4 berth cabins)

Dong Ha: Dong Truong Son First Class: (+84) 053 580 490

Hue: Hue Queen First Classs: (+84) 054 220 221

Hoian: Lotus First Class: (+84) 0510 923 357

Nha Trang: Que Huong Deluxe Sea-view: (+84) 058 525 047

Saigon: Chancery Standard (1st call) & Superior (2rd call)
(+84) 0710 825 831

Can Tho: Saigon Can Tho: (+84) 08 930 4088

Emergency Contacts for Focus Travel:

- Tony Pham, Head of Focus Travel Operation Department: (+84) 989 135 754

- Diem, person in charge of booking the services: (+84) 979 061 384