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

(If XML doesn't load, refresh page.)

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.)

The Tibor Kalman Library

The MFA Studio is hosting an open house this afternoon for prospective students interested in applying to the program. I volunteered to help out because the experience last year was invaluable in choosing a school. I obviously believe strongly in SVA's program, but the hospitality and reception they roll out for these events is unmatched by any of the other Top 10 or NY-area design programs.

Last week, (British) Steve and I got an e-mail from Esther, the department coordinator, asking us to create the signage for the event. The project required us to create several directional way-finding signs and title cards for past projects that are displayed on workstations around the studio. In addition to that, Esther mentioned a long-term installation that the co-chairs wanted for the new library. Over the summer, some studio space was cordoned off to construct the Tibor Kalman Library, a dedicated room for design and visual reference books. The new library space meant new walls, which also means there is a big old patch of boring, white plaster in the front of the studio, begging for someone to spruce it up. Esther asked us to create some temporary signage for the library wall in time for the open house, with the understanding that we'd do something more extensive over the next few weeks.



Minutes later, Steve (one of the dept. co-chairs) called (British) Steve and I into his office for a meeting. The three Steves! He wanted to talk about the wall project, which to him, was far more critical than the event signs. He wanted it done by the open House. Steve and I just smiled, nodded and quietly panicked.

The following Monday, Steve and I sat down to bang out some ideas for the installation. I have little to no experience with collaborative design, a fact I mentioned in my earlier magazine post, so there was some reluctance on my part from the beginning. Steve and I get on like a house on fire, but when you're in a program like this, with so many people asking you to come up with great ideas at every turn, you can feel a little hard-pressed in the beginning to devise a plan you actually want to execute.



After scribbling some "serious" ideas on a pad, we lost our way and began joking about what we'd actually like to see on the wall. We started to build on a particularly rich concept, just adding more and more onto the pile and laughing about how mad the whole thing would be if that's the direction we went in. It was as easy a bit of collaboration as I could have hoped for and I can honestly say that the finished concept was both of our ideas. I'm unsure of where Steve's ideas stop and mine begin. After spending so much time on sketches and ideas and falling in love with the concept (a real problem when you're designing anything), we decided to pitch the ridiculous one to (co-chair) Steve. He was in Spain, so sent him the following e-mail, titled Tibor Library Ideas (TRIPLE AWESOME TO THE EXTREME):

Hey Steve-

This is Steven and Steve and this e-mail already sounds like an Abbott and Costello routine. We've attached a couple of mock-ups for an idea that we're pretty excited about. It is a bit involved, but a portion of it can be installed in advance of the Open House.

We'd like to transform the blank wall space in order to evoke a stately library of the sort that you might find in an old British manor. The walls would be covered in a muted victorian wallpaper and hung with old, gilded picture frames. Inside the frames, we would hang 17th and 18th century oil paintings of Dukes and Earls and regal Ladies, with their hunting dogs and powdered wigs and corsets. In place of their heads, we would insert the covers of monographs and books in the library, photoshopped to resemble the oil painting so that the overall effect was seamless. In the gap between the bookshelves, we'd like to stick this old wing back chair I've got, maybe draping it with a velvet smoking jacket, to make the illusion of a library complete.

On the right side of the column we would hang a large frame with "The Tibor Kalman Library" inset, accompanied by a modest framed portrait of Tibor below. This material could all be installed this week. Like I said, we've attached some jpgs to give you a better idea of what we're talking about, as well as a template for the signage that we're supposed to design for the Open House.

As an alternative, we we're thinking about creating an idea map of the library's contents. This would be a pretty straightforward web of the content inside, in black and white with more bold primary colors used to accent. We would once again reserve the naming information for the right side of the column.

The next afternoon, (co-chair) Steve was back from Spain, but most of the day passed without (British) Steve or I hearing a peep from him about the concept. At a quarter to five, he screamed for the two Steves to get into his office. (British) Steve and I exchanged nervous giggles and made our way across the studio. Perched on (co-chair) Steve's couch, he told us that he loved the idea and that we were free to do as we pleased. There would even be a bit of money to cover our material expenses.




Over the next week, (British) Steven, myself and two of our mates that we inducted into the cause, Areej and Nigel, made trip after trip to neighborhood thrift shops for ratty old picture frames with an ornate flourish. Steve and I went wallpaper shopping uptown and also picked up a few wall sconces at a nearby Home Depot, as well as some paint to give the frames an antique look. During one group shopping trip to an art supply store for our book class, I found a big bastard of a frame on a pile of discarded garbage. It was the perfect style and shape for the project, so back to the studio it went with us.

After class on Thursday night, (British) Steve, Areej, Nigel and myself waited for those folks sitting adjacent to the wall to clear out of the studio and began hanging the wallpaper. We started at a snail's pace since we had zero cumulative wallpaper experience, but after a few strips, we fell into a routine and were able to lock the whole thing down by two or three in the morning. In a short time, the pictures were framed and hung and we were done, barring a few bits of touch up work the following morning.





The following day, we got to the studio and filled in some wallpaper gaps that appeared once the lot dried on the wall. (Co-chair) Steven and Lita (the other co-chair) were already at school and seemed really pleased with the results. It definitely adds a strong visual element to an otherwise dull corner of the studio. Steve and I are still on the lookout for a couple more frames to house the portraits that we photoshopped but didn't get to use. Also, we need to find a chair that matches the wallpaper and work on the actual text sign for the right wall. When all of this is done, we plan on having each guest lecturer pose in the chair (with monocle and smoking jacket) and create a collection of bizarre portraits in front of our creation.

(British) Steve and I have already set our sights on another corner of the studio. There aren't many places in work, school or life where someone encourages you to do something really weird and gives you a bit of money to make the whole thing happen. I need to continually remind myself that I'm lucky to be in an environment where anything can happen as long as the idea behind it is golden.

OPTIC and the World of Magazine Design

For the last two weeks in our Design and Intentions class with Milton Glaser, we've been immersed in the world of magazine design. The first week, we were asked to come up with the concept for a magazine, with a great deal of emphasis placed on a marketable concept that would be able to find both advertisers and subscribers. I spent a great deal of the week leading up to the due date unsure of what I would pitch. I had a few ideas of my own in addition to those I solicited from the folks at a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner I went to at the weekend.

Despite the large volume of feedback, I wasn't happy with any of the prospects. I couldn't see myself wanting to work on the magazines if the entire exercise went into another week of development. At three in the morning, the day of the presentation, I had a flash of inspiration and set to work on "OPTIC: A DVD Magazine of Visual Culture".



I pitched "OPTIC" as a bimonthly DVD and companion booklet for subscribers of all ages that were interested in visual culture like fine art, film, fashion, design and more. Each issue would have a governing theme that categorized the content inside. In place of traditional articles and print advertising, the DVD would contain interviews, short films, video art projects and humorous goofs, in addition to 10-20 second commercials. I was and still am pretty enamored with the idea and was happy to present it to the class, feeling that I had landed on a concept that I was happy to both work on and stand behind.



Unfortunately, during the critique, I was told that it was next to impossible for a DVD magazine to turn a profit. "OPTIC," it would seem, was dead in the water. Six of the magazine ideas that were more audience-friendly or fiscally viable were selected by Milton and the rest of us volunteered to work on the projects. One of my colleagues pitched a magazine of artful erotica and me, the consummate sex culture fiend that I am, joined that group.

I've never designed by committee before so I was concerned, nay perplexed, about how a group of people manage to achieve an overall aesthetic cohesion on a project. How would three designers with three completely different perspectives complete a workable finished product?



It turned out to be easier than I initially believed. Theresa and David, the other folks in my group, are really easy to get along with. We brainstormed ideas for interviews, feature articles and smaller bits of interest for the front and back of the magazine. We all have pretty different sexual/cultural interests which made for a really diverse content. We were supposed to have 16 pages (8 spreads) for the following week, so we divided up the workload and got to work.

Early on, our layouts weren't meshing very well. We ultimately decided that OPTU, the Greek word for "gaze," was less of a commercial monster and more of a large format art magazine. The variety of sexual peccadilloes on display practically demanded a looser grid layout than, say, Newsweek. That gave us the editorial freedom to design a layout about the difference between "kink" and "fetish" differently than you would a photo spread of erotic photographs printed with an antique look.



Our group took a field trip to the Museum of Sex to help generate additional ideas and observe the attendees who, we figured, were our likely readership. In the end, we printed out the spreads, glued a comp together just before class began and pitched the whole thing to the class. Milton thought it was a great treatment of the material, said the visual layout and our intentions behind it really served the material and, when some people in the class said they wouldn't subscribe, assured us they would, that they were "just embarrassed". My group was pleased as punch.

It was a pretty great experience on the whole. I still enjoy the complete control that comes with the solo thing, but the professional design environment rarely works that way. It was nice to know that, when the time comes, I'll be able to put obsession and ego aside and turn out a great product with a group. And as for "OPTIC: A DVD Magazine of Visual Culture," well, I vow to make the model work somehow. I really want to produce an issue of it this summer. And the idea acted as a kernel for an idea I'm currently considering pursuing for my thesis. Not too bad for two weeks of work.



(These are the three spreads I designed for the erotica mag. They're all mocked up with lorem ipsum dummy text, but the pullquotes are real. Click on the spreads for a larger, correctly oriented image. And for those of you paying attention, the spreads are split in the middle by the fold of the magazine which means, yes, the crease falls on the crack of the rubber-clad ass.)

The CW and The Feed

I've got a new post up on (CRIT), the SVA MFAD blog. It's all about The CW network and the lengths it will go to to sell us shit. You can read it here. Toodles.

Design for 3-Dimensions or: How I Learned to Stop Building Models and Embrace the Poo Bot

The MFA Design program at SVA is in a constant state of flux. They tweak the courseload with each incoming group of students to such a varying degree that we have classes our second year counterparts didn't, some mandatory courses they had the option of taking and classes that we all have in common but which are now twice as long as they've been in the past.

One such class, Design for 3-Dimensions, which is now mandatory, is an attempt to get us out from behind the computer and building things with our hands. I had pretty high hopes for this course after an amazing first meeting where we discussed, among other things, sustainability and planned obsolescence in product design. Then we got our first assignment: build a pooper scooper. Pooper scooper projects are the "Hello World" equivalent of the industrial design world, but I was initially game. However, the project went on for a month and my patience wore a little thin. While I was ultimately satisfied with my claw, dubbed "The Power Glove," and was able to use it to successfully pick up a stranger's dog shit near Gramercy Park, I was encouraged to push it further for the final prototype.

But I'd hit a wall. I had little interest in thinking about the practical designs of a pooper scooper, a device that all urban dog owners had told me would never surpass the plastic bag and hand in terms of convenience and efficiency. So I jumped ship. I ran as fast as I could away from the practical world of pooper scoopers and into the loving arms of an ideological sea change. I decided for the last week that I would propose an idea that, if successful, would result in a cultural touchstone, a wealth of merchandising oppurtunities and a generation of kids who would think that picking up dog shit was "totally cool."

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...POOTOMATON, THE UNSTOPPABLE POO-COLLECTING KILLBOT!


Pootomaton uses the latest advances in cybernetics and fecal fusion to convert a pile of dog shit into money. Pootomaton simply places said dogpile into the poop chute in his front panel and in minutes, the shit is converted via the fecal conversion reactor into a dollar bill. EVERYONE WINS!

BritishSteve, my cubicle mate, kindly agreed to play Pootomaton for the day so the exoskeleton was custom-fitted to his fleshy core.

I tailor a panel of sentient pooluminum (cardboard) while BritishSteve stares into the dark, haunting core of his left claw, which just happens to be one of his failed (but fucking awesome) prototypes.


BritishSteve tries on the cowl. We insisted that all people refer to the headpiece as a "cowl". Not a "helmet," not "the head," but a "cowl." People gave us strange looks but we weren't dissuaded. Inside us, beat the hearts of comic nerds.

The morning of, post spray paint enhancements on the sidewalk in front of the school. A security guard gave me a ration of shit about painting it after I'd finished and was sitting waiting for the bot to dry. I told her that I didn't care if I could do it or not, it was already done. Fuck you rules, ART KNOWS NO BOUNDS!

Pootomaton and his own comic make their grand entrance in the classroom.

Pootomaton collects poop. He prints money. And, if prompted, he pops and locks.

At our teacher's request, we stormed the office of Steve Heller, the chair of the MFA program to show off the costume.

Steve's words: "Well, you get an 'A'!"

A boy and his robot.

The comic next to my classmate Kimiyo's shit sculptures. I'm developing a bunch of ancillary products to flesh out the POOBOT-cum-SUPERHERO idea, so I'll post those later. Art school is, like, so wicked.