Early Morning Radio

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Claire and I have been waking up to a radio station of fair quality. She usually gets up for work, showers, has a bowl of cereal and is out the door before I've done than piss and then crawl back under the covers. Imagine my surprise when the DJ was going on about The Raveonettes and Los Campesinos! I could've sworn that the early morning alarm radio was always NPR or some world music station.

This morning I awoke to The National's "Fake Empire," a beautiful yet regrettably somber song, especially for so gray a day. I've added it to my Muxtape, so feel free to listen. I will continue to add songs to that site when the quality of a track compels me or until it gets shut down for copyright infringement. Think of it as a stop gap until I'm out of school for the Summer and my interest in podcasting is revived.

Liquid Psychedelia

We're taking this course that is a simultaneous introduction to writing and an exploration of books and the form they take. It's more often than not pretty hippie dippy stuff with esoteric "writing exercises" that usually yield little more than awful poetry. I'm not receptive to the writing crash course b'c I can already write, but I understand how part of this course serves the greater good.

In a recent assignment, our instructor asked us to take some smaller bits of writing and some other pieces that were the product of free association exercises and create a bunch of varied type treatments. Type treatments are little more than artfully arranged text on a page, with an attempt at making a point or playing with a theme.

I was working on a more mundane series the night before everything was due, composing the work in Illustrator. This yielded the usual too-slick result, a piece of graphic design that has some visual appeal but no real soul. Rather than continue in this direction and have all of the enthusiasm sucked out of the assignment, I decided to experiment with a more physical transformation of simple, black, sans serif text.

Over the course of a few hours, I manipulated printed versions of my text while mid-scan and photocopy. Moving the text back and forth over the scanner and photocopier lens either stretches or condenses the text, often times separating the black portion into it's CMYK composite colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, etc.). I am FUCKING IN LOVE with the results. They are dynamic and each experiment has a surprising outcome. Further explorations are in the works using this initial foray as inspiration. The next obvious direction is the transformation of organic images, the introduction of video/animation work and an attempt of a large scale installation of scanners that act not as devices for capturing static images, but real time video input devices.

Mother fucking art school, ya'll.

Flying Cake (Trial 001)

(More of my videos)

On Saturday, I met my group at the studio and we set to work on the first cake flight. Scott brought in six over-sized, helium-filled balloons, but they struggled to lift an empty Nalgene bottle. A trip to the 99cent store for more balloons also failed to turn the tables in our favor. We hollowed out all but the outer ring of an angel food cake and frosted what was left. From the beginning, the integrity of the floating cake has always been paramount and, as such, we were never interested in floating a box that looked like a cake.

Unfortunately, even the lightest store bought angel food cake (which, by the by, was infinitely lighter than the one we baked in Maira's kitchen) is too heavy to really take flight without strapping an unsightly number of balloons to the base. We have since resolved to frost styrofoam and even sculpt cupcakes, create vacuum molds and churn out perfect, hand painted, nerf foam replicas. All these eventualities didn't stop us from shooting a few screen tests for the ugly prototype. In the end, it took flight twice, owing more to large gusts of wind than defiance of gravity. Pretty magical, if I do say so myself. We are shooting again tomorrow with lighter materials. Here's hoping the fucker floats for a few hours.

Your Basic (Horny) Chair

Last week, I mentioned my first visit to the wood shop for our 3-D Product Reality course. I had to transform a basic wooden chair from IKEA into the embodiment of the word "horny". I cut the legs and back on two simultaneous angles with a power saw, sanded the edges flush, filled in some holes with wood filler and then painted the entire thing with nine coats of plasticized rubber. Bind it, gag it and truss it up to a ceiling pipe and you've got yourself a kinky chair, begging to be whipped.

My classmates were kind enough to spank the horny chair again and again for a few final photos.

Stefan Sagmeister (CRIT, Ep1)

(More of my videos)

I am spearheading the effort to bring a regular video podcast series to CRIT, the SVA MFA Designer as Author blog. I volunteered for the position of Content Editor last semester because I was eager to help develop the ideas of my fellow students that were interested in writing but were reluctant or at a loss for subject matter. I have also been kicking around the idea of the video podcast for a few months now. Ideally, we'll be able to produce something in the range of two videos a month, each of them spotlighting professionals working in any design or visual arts medium. Our program already has a wide variety of podcasts available, many of them focusing on the Paul Rand lecture series. I hope to move out of the classroom and into the studios and workspaces of designers in the NY area.

The first episode, a test run of sorts, was filmed last Thursday, during the Deitch Projects book launch for "Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far" by Stefan Sagmeister. The exciting atmosphere and the fact that we knew the guest of honor made it an ideal trial for working out the podcast kinks and planning for future episodes. With the help of some mates, we captured some dope footage and I chopped and reassembled the whole thing over the weekend.

I'm really psyched to develop this project. Shame I'm not getting a grade for it. Stay tuned for more episodes in the future.

Precision Cut and Made To Order

As the ice breaker assignment in our 3-D Product Reality course, our instructor gave us each a wooden chair from Ikea with a personality trait scrawled on the underside. We walked into class, sat down in the Ikea seats and at the end, like a scene out of a low-rent episode of Oprah, turned the chairs over to reveal our assignment.

The chairs have to be transformed into something that embodies the given trait. I got "horny". After proposing a few different ideas (a chair transformed into Senator Larry Craig, sticking one of it's legs through a glory hole in an airport bathroom or a chair with a bike pedal connected to a cow tongue sticking through a hole in the seat that, when pedaled, allowed you to pleasure yourself), the class chose my more traditional bondage scenario. The bound, gagged, latex-covered transformation is due Thursday and I'll be sure to upload pictures, but in the meantime, here are a few shots of our first afternoon in the wood shop.

"It puts the lotion on it's skin..."

On Tuesday, we have a class called "The Visual Book" in which we complete a number of avant garde projects, many of them in the form of books that mix a visual form with a traditional style of narrative. For our first assignment, we were asked to "alchemize" an existing book and turn it into something else. Lacking inspiration, I stopped by The Strand and told myself that I would transform the first book I saw in the bargain bin. With that out of the way, I bought a cheap bucket, some cheap lotion, some cheap twine and got my papier mache on.

Cake with Maira

As I mentioned in passing here, one of our classes this semester consists almost entirely of the class meeting at our instructor's house, making angel food cake, icing them with bright pink whipped cream, tethering the cakes to balloons and letting go. We haven't got to the end just yet, but we did make a cake. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was worth the price of admission.

The Alameda

While I was in San Antonio over the winter holiday, my parents and I visited the Alameda, a Smithsonian affiliate museum that is dedicated to telling the story of the Latino experience through art, history and culture. The afternoon was a real delight, spent pouring over the work of Vincent Valdez and Alex Rubio, two infamous Westside artists. If you are in South Texas in the near future, I recommend checking the Alameda out. The fine art and anthropological pieces on display made it one of the most memorable and inspiring museum visits in recent memory.

(The picture above is a cropped portion of a collage I made of “Casa Mireles Botanica Infinito," a piece that is in the permanent collection and can be found in the entrance to the Alameda gift shop. Click here for a larger version of "Casa Mireles".)

Picturing to Learn Workshop

This weekend I'm headed to MIT with three other SVA MFAD students to participate in the National Science Foundation-funded pilot program of Picturing to Learn. Details and a full account to follow.

Picturing to Learn actively engages students in creating visual explanations. To go beyond viewing and analyzing images made by others, Picturing to Learn emphasizes:
* Making visual representations to increase understanding of science and engineering concepts
* How visual communication can improve information exchange between disciplines
* The importance of communicating science to the public for the next generation of researchers
* A new approach for teachers to evaluate students' comprehension of various principles

Slog

School began again on Monday. The week is a calm before the semester's storm because, while we have class each night, there isn't yet the crushing pressure of ALWAYS HAVING SOMETHING DUE (! x3). I on the other hand, volunteered to create a title sequence for the program's new podcast series, so I've been arriving early in the morning and leaving really late each night, in addition to preparing for a trip to MIT, brainstorming thesis projects and Treehead scenarios and figuring out the physics necessary to make a tasty pink cake float 10 stories above Fifth Avenue. In other words, business as usual.

My graduate program is better than yours is.

Basil Eggling

Claire gave me an Eggling for Christmas, a small clay pot in the shape of an egg that comes loaded to bear with seeds for herbs or flowers. All you do is crack it like a hard boiled egg, add the seeds, water and wait for a few weeks for your plant to grow. After a few months I can transplant the basil and use the remaining egg shell to fertilize the soil. This is a great gift to give someone that needs a bit of natural growth to liven up their home or office.

Type Video: Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse by Of Montreal

(More of my videos)

This is the preliminary draft of my type video for our "Just Type" class at SVA, a project that required us to make a music video for a song using only letters from the typefaces of our choosing (previously mentioned here). I say "preliminary" because the time constraints of a full semester's course load and the stress of finishing a lot of other very demanding final projects kept me from incorporating all of the ideas I had for the video. In addition to that, one of the stipulations of the project was that the final video be black and white.

Soon, I'm going to begin work on the definitive director's cut (! x3) which will have color sequences, puppets, fake blood and live video.

Christmas Booklist

For the past few years, my Christmas list has consisted almost exclusively of books. This is some of what was waiting under the tree for me this year. More to come by way of B&N gift cards.

Wisdom Is Wasted On Me

(More of my videos)

For the final assignment in his class "Can Design Touch Someone's Heart?", Sagmeister decided to forego the humanity phase of the project and give us the opportunity to design a phrase similar to the work his studio creates in the "Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far" series (Example 1, 2, 3, 4). The basic idea is to pick a truth or sage bit of wisdom that you've identified over the course of your life so far and design that phrase. As usual, huge emphasis is placed on making a beautiful composition, putting effort and thought into the form of said composition and using original, well-composed typography.

I originally settled on a sentence (the exact phrasing of which escapes me now) during an early comp presentation, but was unable to recall where I'd written it down. It was rubbish anyway. I'm not terribly comfortable generating these little pithy phrases because I think they can very easily veer into preachy advice-mongering. After much hand wringing and brainstorming, I settled on the phrase "Wisdom Is Wasted On Me," which is both a piss take of advice in general and aptly expresses my reluctance of settling on any single bit of sage wisdom. I think that, at this time in my life, advice and wisdom go in one ear and out the other for me. I'm much more apt to try and fail than heed the advice of someone in advance of someone before said failure.

For the presentation, I wanted to experiment with audio and video, using long and short consonant and vowel sounds from trite cliches to actually derive the final bit of wisdom. The overall result has grown on me. Several technical complications during filming and post-production have ensured that I will need to re-shoot this project. The final presentation was well-received in class and should be appearing on the site that Sagmeister, Inc. is launching in February to host user-submitted pieces.

A Source of Light

(project originally completed on 10/17/07)

For an assignment two months ago, coming off a streak of straight forward, design-minded projects, Milton gave us the following brief: “Bring in something of your own making which is a source of light.” We weren’t allowed any clarifying questions and were told that we shouldn’t discuss our ideas with or show prototypes to our classmates.

The exercise was a wonderful departure from the work we’d been asked to create up to that point. Having no specific methodology or outcome in my mind, it was a chance to do whatever we pleased, to think as far outside of the box as possible and risk embarrassment and failure.

My initial idea had to do with illuminated thought bubbles. I thought it might be interesting to create single color, plastic, injection-molded thought bubbles that would float above the users head. The bubbles would light up and be customizable with a dry erase marker. I imagined employing one when I was working at the studio and didn’t want to be disturbed: fuck off, I’m busy.

I ran into problems due to shape and lack of time and resources. I don’t know much about plastics and know even less about how to get an injection-molded prototype built. As an alternative, I thought it might be nice to make macabre nightlights and mobiles. Still into the idea of plastic and customization, I settled on the nightlight idea and set to work building forms out of crystal clear packing tape.

While watching a bunch of old Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, I balled and folded and smashed and grew the tape. When I stuck a bunch of wads together and shone a light behind the result, the tape bounced and reflected the light back in on itself, creating this trippy mirrored ball effect. I continued to grow the shape organically until it began to resemble this menacing demon with a protruding lower jaw. The final step was to add gnarly fangs and dainty little horns.

I initially left the face blank thinking that, should a mass-market version be sold to a kid, they might like to customize their own version. But the more I stared at the demon head in the dark, it’s center glowing bright, I started to see shapes in the folds and creases of it’s packing tape core. Staring at the demon has the same end effect of cloud gazing or looking up at the popcorn texture on the ceiling: you begin to make your own shapes, see warts and scowls that are unique to you and you alone.

Milton enjoyed the end result, thought it was an ingenious use of materials, but wasn’t fond of the shape. “What can I say? I like devils and demons,” was my reply. My source of light sits on my desk at the studio to this day.

Guest Lecture Poster: David Rees

One of the most rewarding learning opportunities in the MFA program is the weekly guest lecture series. Steve Heller plumbs his social and professional connections and gets the best illustrators, designers, filmmakers and authors working in the States and invites them in for a chat and Q&A. Each week, a first year student in the program designs a poster for the event and hangs them about the studio.

I was assigned the poster for David Rees, the artist responsible for the comic strip Get Your War On and My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, various alternative weekly newspapers and several comic collections.

I’ve always secretly assumed there was a connection between the lecturers and the design students chosen to create the posters. Rees’ lectures are infamous around the studio because he’s “so fucking hysterical.” There was no shortage of people coming up to me and telling how funny he was, how the lecture wasn’t to be missed and how all the second years were sure to return for this one.

I’m pretty sure I got the gig because I’m “the funny one.” I would’ve laid waste to a pile of babies to design the Paul Budnitz poster (Kid Robot), but I got the lo-fi comics artist with a chip on his shoulder and a pension for using the word “fuck” as a punch line.

Nevertheless, I’m really pleased with what I designed. I digitized the clip art characters used in many of Rees’ comics, incorporated an upside down American flag which seemed apropos given our current distressing sociopolitical climate, and managed to condense a 3-panel joke into one poster.

Everyone kept asking me if I wrote the strip myself. I just shrugged and nodded. Comedy isn’t for the faint of heart.


(Click above for a larger version)

Treehead Seed Bombs the System

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This test short was created as part of an assignment for an abbreviated lecture that just wrapped up at school. Jeff Scher, an illustrator and filmmaker, came in on Tuesday afternoon over the past month and gave us a crash course in experimental filmmaking and animation. Historically, this session was longer and students created a couple of films of varying mediums (stop motion, flipbooks, etc.). This year was a bit like drinking from a fire hose, owing to the smaller number of meetings and the volume of material to cover. For the last class, we were supposed to make a short flipbook for The Green World Campaign, an environmental non-profit. The inspiration/message for the video was Green World's tag for a current campaign: From one seed, a forest grows.

Many of my classmates embraced a more direct approach for their shorts. I'm not much of an illustrator so I played to my strengths, mainly humor, music, loud graphics and anthropomorphic freak out characters. The grenades were originally supposed to explode and cause trees and branches to take over dilapidated city buildings but we had a short window to complete this and I ran out of time. Solution? Blow up the city and grow more trees. Treehead is so awesome, I've decided to create a few 10-minute web shorts and flesh out his world, using some of my accented classmates for vocal talent. Respect.

Pay Your Interns

Last week, in our Design and Intention class, we were asked to "design a poster addressed to fellow designers, urging them to practice ethically." This was the second time we've undertaken a poster trying to encourage someone to stop a particular mode of behavior.

It's hard.

You want to steer clear of any language which sounds like moralistic preaching or proselytizing. People shut down when a message is too critical or accusatory. I was quite pleased with my previous solution for this problem and received a good deal of positive feedback for it. But the audience was more focused this time around.

Rather than trying to tackle a massive, weighty issue that designers are, in part, responsible for (sustainability, the commercialization of culture, poor business practice), I opted for a more personal approach. When I first began the program, I knew that I would likely get a summer internship between the first and second year. I was, however, appalled to find that there was a pretty good chance, in keeping with tradition, I wouldn't be getting paid for my work. Bullshit, right?

After rejecting a few photographic set ups I had for my concept, I settled on the image of a disheveled, Dickensian graphic design intern, begging for change, armed only with his MacPro. Steve and Areej hit the streets with me, acting as photographers, art directors and bodyguards, ensuring the computer wouldn't get nabbed by passersby. Another of our classmates, Nick, wandered by during his cigarette break and leant the coffee cup for additional prop goodness. Steve took just short of 100 pictures, some of which I've included below. Click on the final poster for a larger res copy.







(By the by, kerning is the space between each character and word. Much emphasis in the design world is placed on hand-kerning text to ensure beauty and correct layout. Milton thought that "Will Kern For Food" should be the head and "Pay Your Interns" the subhead. I'm on the fence about it.)