“Colors of Commerce” was a research-based curatorial concept and exhibition at FICTILIS in Seattle which focused on the colors of shipping containers at the Seattle port. We produced an infographic explaining why shipping containers are the colors they are, and why they tend to be arranged in certain groupings, a swatchbook with 20 of the most common colors, color codes, and companies that use them, and a T-shirt advertising “Containerization” (the idea which needs no T-shirt). More at the FICTILIS Colors of Commerce page.

“10.-22.-38 Astoria” is a collaborative print installation that transforms a space into a floor-to-ceiling print exhibition and temporary copy shop. (The name comes from the first xerographic print ever made – with permission by the Xerox corporation.) The concept was first presented at FICTILIS in November 2012. A suspended wire system was used to hang thousands of sheets of paper, and visitors could use on-site copy machines to interact with the collection in several ways and contribute to its evolution over the course of the exhibition.

more at the FICTILIS exhibition page

This mural was created in collaboration with Aimee Cameron for the Media Gateway room of the recently-completed North Quad at the University of Michigan. The basic idea of the mural was to view graffiti, or drawing/writing on walls, as an ancient (yet still totally contemporary) technology that compliments (or contrasts with) all the new technological possibilities of the “Media Gateway”, and to fill the walls with a sort of historical survey of graffiti genres that reference the history of the site itself (formerly the Frieze Building, Ann Arbor High, Carnegie Library), and the history of U-M in general, in obvious and obscure ways.

The mural is done entirely in white chalk over chalkboard paint.  Chalk was applied in several different ways

• drawn with a fine-tipped chalk pencil
• the long edge of a piece of chalk dragged across the wall
• chalk-water mixture splashed onto wall with fingers
• chalk-water mixture smudged onto wall with fingers
• chalk-water mixture dripped onto wall

The mural has two sections, located in the East and West alcoves of the Media Gateway room in North Quad’s residential tower.   Each alcove is further divided into an upper and a lower section by a chalked continuation of the picture rail that runs about eight feet off the ground along the rest of the room’s walls. The upper sections is permanently sealed; the lower section is unsealed, and will constantly evolve over time as old markings are smudged or erased and new ones added.

The mural is partly based on the image “The Universe and Man” (itself based on a 16th century motif, which was later published by French astronomer Camille Flammarion in L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire, Paris, 1888) wherein a human is depicted breaking through the threshold that separates Earth from the Heavens.  (Our “threshold” being the picture rail boundary.)

Much of the mural’s content is positioned as if “reflected” across an invisible midpoint in the hallway between the alcoves.  For example, the U-M motto appears as “Artes, Scientia, Veritas” on the East and “Veritas, Scientia, Artes” on the West alcove.

The arches in the upper center wall of each alcove are patterned after the arch above the main entrance of the Carnegie Library, which you can still see from Huron Street in the façade that’s been incorporated into the architecture of North Quad. The arches were positioned so that when seen from afar, at the other end of the Media Gateway, between the two wooden columns, they appear to connect into a third arch.

This mural was begun in August 2010, just before North Quad’s first student residents arrived, and completed in December of that year. Our team of artists  was assisted by residents of North Quad and participants in the Global Scholars Program, as well as Jamie Lausch, Renee Cruz, Mary Hart, Jennifer Yim (director of Global Scholars program), Julie Herrada (curator of Labadie Collection), Chris McNamara (Professor, Screen Arts & Cultures), Shalvinder Seehra (graffiti artist, North Quad resident), Jeremy Wheeler (local artist).

Some of the programs and departments of North Quad contributed ideas for content: School of Information, Screen Arts & Cultures, Global Scholars Program, Max Kade House, Communication Studies, Sweetland Writing Center, and Language Resource Center.

Mongo Deco (‘Mongo’ from the New York slang for “any discarded object that is retrieved”) is an interior design practice that began as an offshoot of my personal salvage/junking/thrifting hobby and my part-time hauling job. Mongo Deco is based on the simple requirement that everything used to build, renovate, or furnish a space be reused in some way – salvaged on its way to the landfill, reclaimed from demolition, re-purposed from onsite, purchased secondhand, found on the side of the road, etc. Where reuse is impossible or impractical, Mongo Deco combine the most eco-friendly, locally-sourced materials with energy-saving technologies to arrive at a balance between ecology and economy.

More information will be available soon at the official Mongo Deco site.

with:
Andrea Steves (partner)

The Shadow Art Fair is a biannual event that takes place at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti, MI.  Originally begun as a compliment to the Ann Arbor art fairs featuring all local artists, it has become somewhat of an institution in its own right.  Its location at a brewery and its one-day 12-hour format gives it a feel that is different from many fairs.

In addition to being a place where objects are bought and sold, the Fair strives to be a place where artists can meet each other and share resources, present work that isn’t necessarily intended for sale, advance their own projects using our venue, or propose site-specific installations or performances.  From the website:

We strongly encourage applications that propose imaginative or non-traditional use of our event. In past fairs, we’ve had a shadow puppet show, a monster full of surprises, photographs with a creepy Santa, a foot foto booth, and a giant pooping cat, an animation station, and video portraiture.  Anything that can fit into the space that a table would take up or be integrated unobtrusively into the architecture of the Brewery. Think of the most outlandish idea you’ve had for an installation or performance that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. The Shadow Art Fair is the place to give it a try! The Shadow will always be a place to find interesting gifts and meet local artists. Help us make it more than that!

The Shadow is  organized by the Michigan Design Militia, which is composed of myself, Melissa Detloff, Mark Maynard, Jennifer Albaum, and Molly Mast.  More information is available at shadowartfair.com.

early crowds at the first fair in 2006

In the Summer of 2007, I invited saxophonist/composer Andrea Steves to do something dangerous with me. Bravely, she accepted. So we packed our car full of instruments and drove to an old one-room schoolhouse nestled in a remote corner of South Dakota’s Black Hills to spend a week recording music. We had never even talked about making music together before. The noises we couldn’t make with what we brought were provided to us – by the curiosities buried in local secondhand shops and the howls echoing across the valley at night. And thus began a tradition, of thrusting two people together into a confined space in a remote location for one week and forcing them to record an album together using what little instruments they can bring from home or improvise from their surroundings. An intensive, immersive, experimental music retreat.

Below are some pictures and some mp3s of tracks from the first installment of the project. Click the mp3 link to listen or right-click/Ctrl-click and ‘Save As’ to download. More of both will be posted here, from this and future installments, as they become available.

it-gets-much-worse
fire
your-money-or-your-life
down-the-drain

During the XXX annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, festival organizers asked University of Michigan Art and Design MFA students to create installations at some of the festival’s spaces. My collaborator and friend Forest Bright was given access to the famous marquee for three days, and he graciously agreed to let me install some text pieces on it for one of those days. When asked for a quick description of my plans, I emailed the following little blurb:

I’ll be treating the marquee – with its three lines of up to twenty characters each, its place in the city landscape – as a distinct socio-textual genre, with its own forms and conventions. My textual arrangements will take on a range of tones from advertising slogans and self-help motivational-speak to stereotypical urban signage and haiku, emphasizing the subjects of film, the event/location of the festival/theater, and the politics of public display. Some of them will be obvious, others cryptic. All of them will be playful and will draw attention. I’ll be wearing a nice suit and making a somewhat understated performance of the installation. (…in anticipation of Forest’s “15 Minutes” piece on Sunday, which I’ll tell curious passers-by about….)

I was assisted with the installation by Forest Bright and Ted Christensen. Below are some photos from the project.

'Keep 'em smiling' was the American Motion Picture Industry's 'job' during WWII, according to 1942 ads

David Manning was a fictitious film critic invented by Sony to give positive reviews to its films

For two years I rented a room at a house on Fifth Avenue in Ann Arbor that came to be known the “Bluish Barn”. What started as a series of semi-public movie screenings turned into an ongoing experiment in collaborative living exploring the boundaries between public/private space as we hosted traveling artists, thesis presentations, improvisational theater, performances by local musicians, craft nights, bike races, and more. In my opinion, the experiment reached some sort of apogee when a blogger who was unkown to myself and my housemates, in one of many online debates about renting versus owning in Ann Arbor, cited the Bluish Barn as an example of renters doing something good for the community. Shortly after that, I moved to another house nearby to begin the experiment anew. Bluishbarn.com still exists as an archive of the house’s past and a template for its future.

with:
Mikey Barringer (roommate)
Michelle Winkfield (roommate)
Eric Adams (roommate)
Christina DeAngelo (roommate)
the tenants of 716 (neighbors)

Vita Brevis (from one half of the Latin aphorism ars longa, vita brevis, “life is short, art long”) was a short-lived semi-mock-advocacy group advocating eventual death. That is, all of us as human beings wanted to die…eventually. (Another point of the project may have been to think critically about certain issues being raised by advances in the life sciences.) The activity of our group peaked when we organized a small demonstration for a semi-mock-transhumanist lecture by Tim Flood entitled “Transhumanism and You” [see pictures below]. I took upon myself the task of composing simple one-line slogans and chants for writing on signs and shouting at the demonstration.  These included the following:

learn to live with death
all’s well that ends
ageing is not a disease
long live no one
quality of life, not quantity
STOP postponing the inevitable
immortality: a fate worse than death
all good things must come to an end
stop hogging our children’s biomass
out out brief candle!
curtains, please

“Hell No!  We WILL go!”
“What do we want?  Death!  When do we want it?  Eventually!”
call: “Out with the old!” response: “In with the new!”
Hey hey, ho ho, transhumanists have got to go!
“Vi-ta Bre-vis”, [clap, clap, clap-clap-clap]

Shortly thereafter, one of our members traveled to England and had an awkward dinner with Aubrey DeGrey at some Chinese restaurant. The group has since dissolved, as member have gone our separate ways, each of us working individually toward eventual death.

with:
Zack Denfeld
Forest Bright

For ebayaday, a serial exhibit using ebay as a venue for art, I offered up an auction titled “map to my buried treasure – NO RESERVE!” with the following item description:

Up for auction is the only existing map to my buried treasure.

Actually, you’ll get a map to a map to a map to my buried treasure. One map leading you to a second map leading you to a third and final map which leads ultimately to the location of my buried treasure. That’s three maps for the price of one. Plus the treasure.

I cannot disclose the nature of the treasure nor estimate its value. But the maps are each original handmade drawings, limited editions of one, signed by the author. They may not be ‘buried’ in the literal sense, but they will be hidden in secret locations known only to me. The first of the three will be mailed via USPS to the address you provide.

As for the treasure, I buried it myself, on a deserted island-like place in a remote corner of the world.

NOTE: All items included in this auction are located within walking distance of that remote corner of the world called downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

If no one wins this auction, no action will be taken. I will take the knowledge of the treasure’s location to my grave. My friends and enemies will continue to press me to reveal some clues – to no avail. The item will not be reposted, and the items will remain where they are until some lucky soul chances upon them years from now – or never.

If for some reason a fissure opens in the Earth or the forces of industry decide to change the landscape in a way that prevents you from following the course laid out by my maps, I will happily consider refunding part or all of your payment. The winning bidder is invited to email me with reports of any disasters that may hinder your progress.

The winning bidder is instructed to pay within 3 days of the close of this auction with Paypal. Furthermore, you will promise to make no mention of this auction whatsoever to anyone inquiring about the origin of the treasure you will soon possess.

Please leave positive feedback after you have found the treasure. Anyone who chooses not to follow these rules will forfeit their right to refund in case of fissures, etc. [see above] and will recieve negative feedback.

I reserve the right not to sell the map to my buried treasure to anyone with eBay scores of less than 10 or excessive negative feedback.

The winning bidder will embark on an adventure of considerable proportions, traversing unkown lands and encountering many strange and wonderful things along the way to my buried treasure. Your endurance will be tested. Serious bidders only please.

Please email me with any questions.

The item sold for $10.

screenshot from my ebay notification email