A while back, the folks at Gestalten included a few of my site intervention projects in a lovely book called Tangible: High Touch Visuals.
I highly recommend it, and its sister book Tactile. They’re both chock full of excellent artists and designers, and I break them out in a fit of “you-gotta-check-this-stuff-out” fever to anyone who comes anywhere near my bookshelves.
I am absolutely thrilled to share a volume with people like Mark Jenkins, Joshua Allen Harris, William Lamson and tons of other artists who endeavor to smack the urban landscape with the giant cartoon glove of whimsy, and I hope y’all will check it out.
Urban Interventions is 69 beans if you buy it direct, BUT, as of this posting, it’s 37% off if you buy it on Amazon!
Or you can just wait until it’s in the big bookstores and hunker down between the rows, all sprawled out taking up aisle space.
I know how you do, ’cause I do it too.
I talked to a bunch of folks about it ahead of time, none of whom could make it out. Fair enough. Zach’s a nice young man, and was kind enough/self-promotional enough to post the video on Vimeo. Here it is, see for yourselves:
If you’re in the middle of an existential crisis, this video by artist Jon Rafman of the Kool-Aid Man meandering through various user-created realms of Second Life might be just the thing to shake you out of it. Or conversely, if your life is boring as hell and you need a little existential crisis up in your bizness, this might get that process kick-started. Really, I’m pretty sure it can work either way.
While the video queues up — and it’s kind of a long one — you should know that after some zen-like gliding through various naturescapes and running through empty cities (and engaging in a robot battle) Kool-Aid Man gets raw (NSFW) at about 7:50, right after he does some tai chi with a couple of refugees from a Renaissance Faire. So, fair warning.
If you’d rather get a more Cliff’s Notes version of the Kool-Aid Man’s shenanigans in Second Life, you can click on the image below (or here) to go to a slide show (also periodically NSFW) wherein Kool-Aid Man:
- Visits faux-NYC, climbing the Empire State Building and dangling from the Statue of Liberty’s face
- Poses as one of the melting clocks inside Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory
- Makes his way through ancient city ruins, haunted underground caverns, and a desert harem
- Charters a steampunk submarine at some vaguely Mediterranian port, and is smilingly abducted by a UFO
- Spies on a tattooed couple having sex in a shower stall that has been inexplicably built in the middle of a jungle, and then dances with a white fox-man in bondage gear at a gay furry club
..and much more.
(click for slideshow)
Now, in case you haven’t gone through Jon Rafman’s site and discovered this for yourself, the video and slideshow are actually promotional materials for Jon’s project where he gives tours of Second Life with a Kool-Aid Man avatar. And last we heard — meaning as of this posting, it still says so on Jon’s site — you can schedule your very own Kool-Aid Man tour of Second Life by emailing koolaidmaninsecondlife [at] gmail [dot] com.
(That is, if you have any kind of inclination to use, or working knowledge of how to use, Second Life. Which I do not. I created an avatar two years ago, and I’m pretty sure he’s still hovering uselessly in the air above a desert island where I left him.)
Tip o’ the hat: Art Fag City posted about this project a while back, and it’s been stuck in my brainpan ever since.
So, it’s as official as it gets. I just heard from the producers today who confirmed it as a “go,” with the caveat “anything can happen, but we’re looking good.” I’m going to have a story on this week’s episode of “This American Life,” and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it.
As the weather has gotten nicer and the day job has slowed down, I’ve been able to get out into the world with the bag o’ art materials here and there. Here are a couple of interventions that I slapped down recently:
APRIL 3 – JUNE 12, 2009 SYNTHESIS : CONTEMPORARY COLLAGE Carroll Square Gallery, 975 F Street NW, Washington DC 20004
OPENING: Friday, April 3, 6 – 8pm
CURATED BY HEMPHILL FINE ARTS, and FEATURING WORKS BY:
D.Billy | Billy Colbert | Nathan Gluck | Franz Jantzen | Camila Rivera-Morales | Holli Schorno | Al Souza | Daniel Tierny
These are my contributions to the show… but you’ll have to swing by the gallery to check out the excellent work by the other seven artists. And, of course, to get the full sensory experience of my pieces… which may or may not include olfactory overtones of the studio environment in which they were created. (Hint: think propane heater, macaroni and cheese, Mexican Coca-Cola, and cats.*)
*Kidding. They’re unscented and hypo-allergenic. I swear.
Consider this an open call for people to illustrate that showdown. I’m talking anything from drawings on napkins to multi-million dollar blockbuster films. Make this happen, internet.
I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.
I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.
Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.
Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.
But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.
This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:
I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions to Jeff’s previous post about my artstuffs — a belated thanks to everyone who reblogged or contacted me for more info — so I thought I’d share a few pics from my most recent outing.
Today is national fix-the-country day, and it’s gonna be a long one. No matter what side you’re on, you’re probably sick of the campaigning by now. As a little distraction from all the election-related news you’re sure to be drowning in, I thought I’d post a video of me telling the story of Royal Quiet Deluxe, (chicken band) at The Moth.
The story links to one of our recordings, made with a primitive drum machine, delay/loop pedal, and my tireless prattling.
The following track, though, is a different sort of sound collage. We recorded it on the front porch of Tim’s parent’s place out in Botetourt County, VA, one hot summer evening. You can hear crickets and locusts in the background, something I think is pretty cool. I am playing the typewriter as percussion here, Tim is playing guitar, and the chickens are pecking and vocalizing. Tim mixed in a recording about Exotic Newcastle Disease in Southern California that was recorded over the telephone many years later, and presto — you have:
There’s one more story in this saga. I’ve told it onstage at a Moth event recently, and I’m waiting to get ahold of the video so I can crunch it and post it here — and I’m working on the text version for those of you that want the full-on boxed-set experience. Suffice it to say that while the Internet has helped me find a whole new audience for this band that I never thought existed, I am 100 percent positive that the Reverend Al Sharpton still thinks the whole concept of Royal Quiet Deluxe is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.
You can see a story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:
