2.28.2010

Verbal Pauses


Why do we feel the need to create and, if we are not creating, we feel a negative sense of unaccomplishment and stillness? Time stops and we feel uncomfortable with the silence. With our hands we fidget, or, within speech, pauses are filled with verbal utterances, completing the gap between language, thought, and experience. Stuttering and verbal pauses are examples of what the Poststructionalist philosopher Lyotard describes as “extralinguistic experiences.”

Art will speak for us and will be a product of experience and the journey taken. What is seen will be able to translate what cannot be described in words. “…Language does not account for everything, ‘A gap between language and experience that language cannot cover; this extralinguistic experience, in the form of the aesthetic, is crucial.’”

My purpose of a radio station is to rely on memory. Sounds that people recall in their memories (which is silent) connect with my posters when they see “Musicanator”. I do not feel the need to explicitly link image and sound into movie or film. My “movie” is more consequential and postmodern because it is precarious and relies on the immaterial of the mind.

Watch the clip from Pulp Fiction to notice how background sound (ambiance, music, and silence) is “acting” (John Cage's relationship with sound) while the actors are being still.

“The purpose of postmodern art is to disorient the viewer, to blur the boundaries of discourse, and to challenge the normative by the singularity of a work of art.”

Would you like to know Italian, Russian, or Cantonese?

Go to: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

IHRTLUHC

Ian Wallace.

Mentor - Pieter Janssen a.k.a. Piet Parra

Here are a few things that I think Parra gets inspiration from:


William Copley

















Picasso's Satyr and Minotaur Rape Scenes


























Spy vs. Spy
























Goya's La Maja Desnuda


Stewie's Pointed Head


Rather than write down what I've already told you in my Powerpoint, if you like Parra and would like to find out more about him, here are some hyperlinks that I used for my presentation to click on and forge your own journey through space and time. "With the practice of web surfing and reading by following hypertext links, the web has produced specific practices that affect our modes of thought and representation. It is a mode of visuality distinguished by the simultaneous presence of heterogeneous surfaces, which the user links by charting a course or by random exploration." (Bourriaud, 114)

Fecalface Interview

Rockwell Clothing

Big Active

Le Le

Product of God

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

An The Magazine Interview

High Snobiety Review

Submarine Channel Interview

Nike Collaboration

99 Percent Interview

Parra Soundsystem

High Snobiety Review 2

Colorblind Skateboards

Ben-G Shoes

Big Active Blog

XLR8R Interview

2.21.2010

Progress Latency

Since my final project is complete, this last week was used for formulating ideas and documenting them on pieces of paper. I've been making many sketches, transcribing them onto paper as soon as I can. I have hit an artistic block. I am just trying to be productive. There was no aim for my artistic endeavors this past week besides production, any production at all. All I wanted was to create.

Otherwise, I spent a lot of time making my mentor PowerPoint, which you will see on Tuesday. Musicanator was a success, although only a couple of people tuned in. I successfully mixed an almost fluent playlist on Garageband and I have made iMixes on iTunes of all the Musicanator programs. Now, I have to figure out a way to make the link widely public.

2.16.2010

Le Le - Disco Monster music video

2.15.2010

Plans for Post-Love Is MADness

1. Make business cards

2. Start designing products for Spring term exhibition
a. patches (small and affordable)
b. tote bags (less affordable, but popular)
c. tee shirts (less affordable, but popular)
d. reject paper-based products

The theme for Spring term exhibition:
a. technology (un-life, superior to humanity, video games)
b. desexualize content (as compared to Love Is MADness)
c. make casting call for promotional salespersons at event
(selected persons casted for "geekiness," male and female)
d. change location of exhibition to larger, still appropriate,
venue

Titles for artworks brainstormed:
a. "CPU Wins!" (emphasis on exclamation marks and
digitalized typography
b. "One-handed bandit" - from Twilight Zone episode
titled "The Fever"
c. "My bicycle is trying to kill me!" - from Calvin and
Hobbes comic
d. "I work for robot" (switch social roles)
e. HAL 9000 reference from 2010: A Space Oddyssy
f. Wardrobe malfunction from Super Bowl XXXVIII
g. other video game references...to be brainstormed
further

3. Make Musicanator playlist songs available for purchase on iTunes

2.13.2010

Love Is MADness pics


See images of Love Is MADness!

Progress to Success


When achievements from Love Is MADness are considered, “success” becomes a word of many components. To know of success there must be a comparison to assess the event between what was anticipated and what actually happened. I took inventory of what was bought, but also of people influenced. I must take into account both to predict what sales will be in the near future and plan accordingly. It becomes my success to become a more accurate forecaster of my products’ popularity based on my experiences when selling my brand of graphic design.

Success is also a transitory word because, if achieved, will lead to a “succession” of other opportunities. MAD Design progressed from a very small to a slightly larger audience. As a result of a certain type of success, I predict an increase in commissions after having been able to talk to students about my freelance operation.

During Love Is MADness, many students asked how “sales were.” Considering that I made 300% profits on each set of stickers sold, sales were very profitable. For post cards, I got back what I put in and made 0% profit for each post card sold, sales were not profitable in a monetary sense. However, students were very impressed with my graphic designs, usually reacting with a surprised response, “You designed these?” when I said that the valentines are self-designed.

It would have been a sign of an unknown audience to make a profit during the 5-day solicitation period, but was not predicted. My purpose for Love Is MADness was to put a face to the names MAD Design and Musicanator. I predict that through distributing my merchandise to places like Avenue Art & Company, selling online at Etsy, and meeting students, that my next art exhibit in spring term will be more popular because of associations made with Love Is MADness, and turn a profit. There are steps before hitting it big in sales. I do not want to be a fad, but a consistently growing operation.

A object as the product of a fad would dismisses the fine graphic quality that my artwork possesses. It would make people “crazy.” Which, now that I mention it, would be a great idea for a MAD Design poster. MAD Design is not short lived, but I hope will continue to build a customer base over the next year.

IHRTLUHC

Ian Wallace.

Happy birthday to me...




2.07.2010

Week 5 Developments

Things were going as planned until this afternoon. I am now on a mad search (no pun intended) to find my large Love Is MADness poster that was at the top of the Warch Campus Center stairwell.

I am not ill prepared for events such as this theft, although it is another thing that my tight schedule cannot well compensate for.

Who could have done this, why, and for what purpose? Have I provoked somebody so far as to steal at least $50 dollars or more worth of my materials, labor, and (most importantly) customer spending? Should I have made a more theft-proof poster? Should I have not implemented a series of provocative countdown images to Love Is MADness? Why me and why at such a time that Is so close to the actual event? Should I have not put so much effort into the large poster?

How do other companies deal with such passive aggressive acts of violence? I am infuriated at whoever stole it, but also frustrated at my predicament. What now? Should I put up my duplicate Love Is MADness poster? Will it also be stolen? What then? Do I have to get a pair of security guards around my artwork? I was planning on auctioning the large poster off...that more money that could have been in my pocket.

I feel as if the success of Love Is MADness is compromised from this one setback. Does that forebode my expectations for the actual event? I am speaking out of rage, in a way it does, but I also have faith (that is what it mostly comes down to...studies identify nothing) that there will be enough publicity in other ways to keep up talk.

I want to get back at those who did this to me...through aggressive advertising. Make them suffer for the theft they might have thought to be insignificant. Guess what? Karma's coming to get you, whoever you are, in the form of public humiliation.

Andy Warhol: Copy the Self

Andy Warhol said to “do everything” because doing everything “seemed feasible.” This attitude towards mixture of art may explain his success in his last unbridled efforts after death (Warhol was completely changed after the assassination attempt and believed that he was living in a dream or actually dead) when ‘redoing’ artworks, such as The Last Supper, to create a sense of assumption of Da Vinci’s and others’ creations.

He transformed from a commercial artist into a business artist, commissioning portraiture of those who could afford it and establishing himself within a group of famous artists over the last few centuries as a masterful painter, as well as businessman.

“Art can’t seem this strange and new without some barrier being broken.” He couldn’t distinguish between life and death and had fear of being held in no place at all. The late works of Warhol broke into the living,

Warhol was also able to revisit old subject matter in an ethereal way since he was ‘dead.’ Being able to “copy myself” was of enormous interest to him. Versatility was his strength. By endlessly reproducing his own and others’ images, strength was held in numbers; the longevity of his art works relying on the system of roots that he created.

The exhibition gallery of works demonstrates Warhol in radicant form. There was always some new idea of presenting his art that he firmly established himself into, but with reminders of the past.


Klaus Nomi: Inbetween

The lecture made by John T. Gates of what he does in Germany was a small sampling of what Klaus Nomi did in outer space. It didn’t matter where Nomi was, whether in America or traveling through Europe, “culturally six million miles away” and establishing himself wherever he could. He was so far out because opera, popular music, and fashion had not been combined before in such an awesome way. In Nomi’s case, there was no fear of “high” art, as Gates mentioned that there might be today. It was creating a world where the strange was normal in order to be able for Nomi to explore his musical performances.

At first, I was trying to place Nomi within my realm of binary thinking: is his music pop or operatic, gender male or female, and composition technology or flesh? There was a sensory overload that I assume most people that were exposed to his world were confused even more so. Everything about him seems to be wrong in Earthly terms, but is right once removed from our places. The place of performance changes the context as well, be it in misfit New York, the fashion-savvy Paris, or anyplace in-between. He was more “successful” at a time when he related the most to the crowd. Then, he would take his idea and invade the viewers as long as he could, until finally moving away to another city or country.

Nomi would have fit into the Twilight Zone perfectly, “You're traveling through another dimension: a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind: a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.” Nomi’s world would have been made of all angles, reflected light, and also have been in black and white. There would be infinite opportunities for abstraction; interplay between media and information; and melding between “blood and guts” of technology and alien physicality. It would be, in a few words, too much for us to handle on a daily basis. Our senses are still too sensitive, but are becoming resistant to becoming overloaded. Are we not slowly becoming completely desensitized to art?


IHRTLUHC

Ian Wallace.