my computer died 5 days ago and i am still without but not too much longer i hope

my computer crashed. i have been busy making stuff for other people and i miss writing here. i feel weird blogging without pictures. one of the blogging rules i gave myself, was never post without an image. i don't know why but something about an image on my blog feels more true to my experience of the world since i am primarily a visual person. so here are some pictures(borrowed from my flickr page) of some things i have observed in my landscape

i am left to question the proliferation of these Orange line elements around town. I wonder why this cable has to be so long and obvious on every building that it is installed on

sometimes when i see this stuff i see it as the most beautiful sculptural intervention possible

i guess i should explain what happened. my computer crashed, and not just an ordinary run of the mill easily recoverable software crash. the motors that turn the internal hard drive actually quite being able to turn, so no data can be recovered unless i have the hard drive rebuilt(which costs as much as a new computer, and besides i am praying to the data gods that i backed up the essentials). i thought i would be more upset by the loss of my computer, but day 5 of having no computer of my own, after 4.5 years of constant use has not been so bad. i am not saying i am giving up having a computer just that i am learning to make do(between mobile web on my cell phone and checking email once a day on an old dell desktop at my parents house i am getting by). at the moment though i can't update my website, i can't work with my digital images and i can't finish the proposals i was working on, but i will be okay. Mostly i am okay because i got two really great pieces of news last week, so the total loss of my digital iLife has been less devastating. as soon as i get my old computer restored or my new one arrives i will resume blogging and discussing what i have been doing, but for some reason i feel less comfortable writing on a computer that is not mine, or maybe writing on one that is fixed in place after the total freedom to write anywhere afforded by the laptop.

an organ, some signs, a carnival booth, a southern home facade, and some thoughts on life in the city of charleston

so i found the guts of an organ on the side of the road and i totally plan to hack into it and make noise with it, or failing that it will become raw material for a future sculpture installation project
and as luck would have it i found this very appropriate sign, just in case i forget what to call the place i work in

and i found all the magnetic signs from a cold stone ice cream store and put them up on my metal wall. I figure on those painfully hot days i will look at the ice cream menu and think cool thoughts.

i also tinkered around with the line piece some more, once it is finished i will clean it up and paint it and then it will really pop.

last week i gave a lot of my building energy to the out of hand events company. I have been making sets and props for them like this southern home facade built to house a 9'x12' rear projection screen. I was given a very basic drawing and idea to work from. in the end the illusion was carried through.

i like this kind of work because creating a simulated environment really interests me.

my other bit of magic was making a "carnival" booth out of two sheets of 1/4" plywood. I hacked this together in a couple hours and then plastered it with printouts of coney island posters to give it that authentic carnie vibe

I have been thinking alot about how charleston functions as a city and it's relationship to the idea of a simulation. I have always seen charleston as the perfect example of the simulacrum that baudriallard speaks of. Charleston is more the image of a city than an actual city. Because the city is designed to cater to tourist, college students and young professionals the city landscape reflects that. The city fosters a locust approach to living. Swarm in, go out to clubs, restaurants and disposable non-essential retail, go home and think nothing of it. Because Charleston maintains the appearance of a city everyone assumes it is a city. But it functions more as a version of one than as an actual city. and speaking of simulations of things, i am still working on my army of water bottles and as soon as i finish with those i will post them here.

tiger woods action painting and performance art

i saw this tiger woods commercial the other day and it made me think about action painting and the nature of the artist's mark. Evidence of the hand of the artist is something that has become less desirable in the contemporary art market. the notion of design has swept through every facet of modern life. As wal mart and target strive towards bringing good design to the masses a certain taste for slickness and presentation permeates the art world. two poles have begun to emerge, on one end are artists who produce well manicured, well designed, well composed and slickly executed works, and on the other pole has been this emergence of the faux naive or handmade work. The irony is that both of these methods are as insincere and rooted in marketing as the other. as i watched the 30 second tiger woods spot i couldn't help but think that the author of the commercial was a half assed student in school. she or he probably took some art history survey classes, and whether they realized it or not absorbed this classic hans namuth film of jackson pollack painting on top of the camera.

It made me think about how there is a contemporary art history lesson embedded in the tiger woods commercial. while jackson pollack was still truly trying to express what a modernist angst ridden shamanistic artist living on the fringes of society and at that time the art world felt, tiger is just flaunting his huge cultural capital. But there is a distinct difference in the way tiger paints his painting. tiger's "art" is the result of pure action and no innate expressive emotion. his painting is the evidence of an action, in this case hitting paint filled golf balls similar to performance, process, and action artists of the sixties(although to his credit i cannot immediately think of any artist making art with golf swings at that time). In the sixties the contemporary art world in america was small and exclusive, no one cared, there wasn't a need to have a perfect artist statement and expansive resume, these artists were primarily making work for themselves and their friends(the audience was an added bonus, they flocked to the spectacle later to see people shoot themselves and camp out in the gallery). One of the methods employed by these artists was to follow a series of actions(see richard serra's verb list for the epitomy of this) and then the resulting "evidence" comprised the work. As a self described student of the sixties, it's art, it's culture, and to a lesser extent it's music, i try and imagine myself somewhere in between the purely expressive art and purely process/action art of this era. It is funny how a 30 second commercial for a product i will never covet, endorsed by a celebrity i care nothing about, can hit upon so many of my interests. as if this rabbit hole of thinking weren't enough to make me really want to go back to school and write a book, i took the thought process even further. i started thinking about other incidences of car commercials riffing on artworks and i remembered a few years back when the honda company ripped off/paid homage to fischli and weiss's der lauf der dinge.
here is the honda commercial.

after re-watching i also noticed a subtle tribute to other artists work including calder mobiles and such, and some of chris burdens kinetic pieces.
now compare to the fischli and weiss

oh well the lesson is i shouldn't be allowed to watch tv, when i am thinking about art, it's kind of like grocery shopping when i am hungry.

blame it on craigslist

a link to this ad i placed on craigslist

After i finished my marathon of contact mics, I really got the itch to play some more music. Lately I had only been playing once or twice a month with phil estes, because we had both been so busy our schedules only lined up occasionally. So I took the plunge and placed an ad on craigslist, and much to my delight i have had a pretty full schedule of music this week. The responses have run the gamut, from generic mushy hippie bar music(which i think indicated that the guy hadn't read my post at all, but i thought he was looking to try something new so i tried to do it but couldn't make it through more than an hour and a half of that music), then i played with a really promising guitarist and keyboard player, who are looking to write and play a mixture of pop indie keyboard rock mixed with other stuff, and then tonight I am going to try out for a pretty straight ahead progressive rock band. All of these situation have been interesting, but I still think i am going to work on expanding my solo performance abilities and compose solo compositions on the drums and other instruments i constructed. I kind of see the drums as a big portable, variable,sculptural arrangement, since i can change the setup of the pieces in the kit to suit the situation i am in.

this was a strange happening, I started playing with starbucks straws again, and am now using the same method to construct linear work with steel pipe. when i finish with the welded steel versions of the melted plastic straws, i will clean up the steel and paint it green to match the straws. I always find it satisfying to draw inspiration from the materials that inspire the work.

i keep finding piles of stuff, like these coat hangers, so i stacked them up for now. I also found a payphone but can't decide what to do with that yet.

i had a brief moment of inspiration and endeavored to realize my bifurcating lines from the rust prints as actual objects. I admit this is also partly inspired by john bruneau's infinitree i saw four years ago, but always thought would be cool to make. it is proving to be a bit difficult to reach the connections as the lines begin intersecting each other.

3-2-1 contact microphone

somehow a couple of weeks ago after i finished playing music with a friend and after consuming several mesmerizing solo percussion performances online i started thinking about ways to expand the sounds i could make when drumming. So i started making contact microphones and attaching them to things .i will make a video once i finish with all my modified percussion instruments and set them up with my full kit and figure out how to play it all at once.
I have here my new electric tambourine, and ribbon crasher, and on top of the drum sticks is my single tambourine hand shaker(i used the lid off a frappucino bottle to secure the contact mic in place, it was a perfect fit)
oh and somewhere along the week i found all these frame corners, it's weird cause now i have a bunch of frame scraps and i don't even like frames that much...go figure
i started by balancing a corner against the other and then kept going. I had to restart several times because when one falls several go with it.

just having fun with one of my favorite coffee mugs from our coffee mug collection
so this is my work desk, i have been attaching a contact mic to everything testing the results, and yes i have miked the vibrating coffee cup and used it as a sort of tone generating device.

this is my old dj mixer i bought like 8 years ago,(during that whole second wave dj craze, i got it real cheap because a month after it stopped being hip this things showed in pawn shops in droves) the cross fader broke a while ago, and i just never fixed it. when i started to make the contact mics i decided this would come in handy, so i went ahead and removed the cross fader and hacked into all the channels and then made patch cables to run the signal to my bass amp...translation this makes the noise from the contact mics controllable allowing me to control the volume without standing in front of the amp.

i found this giant illy coffee bean container in the recycling bin behind a coffee shop, and i was using it as a hand drum in the studio but it was too quiet, so it became the first contact mic enabled instrument in the studio, it has a great sound somewhere between a djembe drum and a bucket.
I don't know what direction this contact mic marathon will take , but i do know that this would be a perfect project to do anywhere, since all the parts to make these are readily available at radio shack or any other equivalent electronics and wiring supply place. I keep working on applications trying to get things out there. i did hear from the present group that i am one of their finalists for their next cycle of editions,unfortunately only subscribers to their service can vote but check them out I was honored to among the finalist.

new developments for me and for starbucks

so s-bux rolled out a new temporary package re-design in an attempt to re-brand starbucks as a place you go to get good coffee...good luck with that. But i will say i like the new color scheme emphasizing the brown of the original starbucks, and returning to the cruder hand drawn logo and not the saul bass like iconic corporate logo.

in this picture i am holding another one of starbucks new toys, which i want everyone to get and send me more of, it is a special plastic stir stick that also plugs the drink hole in the sippy lid. It is really weird because it has a stylized mermaid as the top most element of it. I also worked on some logo re-designs of my own and when i get them cleaned up and ready i will load them up here the day before starbucks released their re-designs i had already painted these plaster coffee cups based on the color scheme of the old cup. So i immediately began work on a new cycle of coffee cup inspired pieces and drawings based on the new logo.
A week ago i found and hauled back to the studio all of the old furniture from a subway that was being remodeled.

I took one of the single benches and threw it on top of an old crate in order to create my very own eating seating in the studio
I then proceeded to disassemble the two double seats to see what I could do with them
the first permutation of the double seat endless loop was held together with the hardware salvaged off of the seats.

but it turns out that the hardware was not strong enough, and much to my delight i came the next day to discover a new variable sculpture arrangement involving the collapse of the seats which crashed into the picture frames.

needless to say after i re-installed the frames and played around the subway seats as room dividers I moved on to execute my original vision for the seat parts.

here is an image from afar of the seat parts held together with a set of double re-enforced hardware seems to be working.

vibrating coffee cup

A couple of years ago i became obsessed with the idea of making a series of vibrating coffee cup, and had all but abandoned the idea until now.

found some frame scraps, in between water bottle production

I found all these frame samples and scraps on the street the other day so ibrought them back to the studio to play with for awhile

i've started by organizing the frames into a cluster, and i have been looking at this for the last couple of days, deciding if i like it or not

so this is my production painting area, formerly the rust print table, it is the same one i built i last summer when i was working outside on the rust prints,and it has served me well

it takes a village, or in this case and army of water bottles.
here they are pre-paint

so i got in such a production routine that it got uncomfortable to be working on the floor, so i built a standing level casting station, and as you see in front of it my collection of plaster debris is growing. Secretly I am just as excited about the plaster debris and chip offs from the molds as i am about the castings being produced.