Art I Made in Q3–2022

Summer of 2022 was very fun. I had a new job going smoothly, a buzzing social life, and a golden age at home with all roommates enjoying life together. It looks like I turned out a ton of work, picking up projects from before COVID and encouraging party people to get back into interactive art. (In contrast, party people of of 2021 were happy just to be out of their home, so the bar for art was low.)

What did I do?

Home

Some light home projects.

Hood

Someone scratched the hood of my car. Pretty gnar.

I got to fixing it very quickly, within 2 days.

Mask and sand.

Paint with bed liner.

Presto. At this point, I’ve done this procedure about 5 times.

Sadly the hood got wrecked about 2 months later! It was a fine paint job, though I think I could do better. Back to shiny, unscratched red.

Dinosaur Tattoo

This was to be the fifth year for Something Else, so I was excited to get a tattoo! I invited my co-founders to join me, but they prefer blank skin so this was all me and the tattoo artist.

I gave the tattoo artist about 5 dinosaur pictures and they thought this was the most promising for a design .In 2019 I made two small wooden sculpture dinosaurs. Here, I outlined the photo of them and added fill colors.

Sketching with erasable marker three months before the appointment.

The piece came out well and is my first color tattoo. Color takes forever and therefore costs a lot. I probably will avoid color in the future for tattoos.

At this point, I have been getting a new tattoo each year for about five years and it’s great. My canvas is starting to fill up so maybe I’ll slow down.

Games

Somehow after Alyssa introduced me to Likey No Likey in 2021, I got very into making games.

Spinny Thingy

Spin the Bottle. Spin the Knife. Spin the Fish. I designed these in June. So they debuted in early July.

Spin the Knife was the most popular by far, though some people hated it. The game is simple: players are in a circle around a prop knife on a table. Active player spins the knife. Whoever it points to, they pretend to stab (usually to death). The victim acts out their part and everyone has fun!

Almost no one ever played Spin the Bottle. Partly this was COVID caution, but mostly it’s just that Spin the Bottle is a very awkward game.

Spin the fish was supposed to incoherent, lacking any clear guidance on what you do when you’ve spun the fish and found a recipient. Some people went for erotic touching, which worked, but otherwise it required too much creativity from the players. My hope was that we could warm up the players with the other games, and then they’d be ready to invent. Nope.

Feely Meely

While designing the “Spin” games, I started looking for the dumbest board game cover design I could find. I stumbled across this forgotten children’s game from the past, “Feely Meely”. The gameplay is great for a party, because everyone reaches their hand in at the same time so errant touching is inevitable and fun. It’s competitive and some people are much better at it than others, which is a fun surprise.

I built this one using an old game box. The game itself requires almost no build, so most of the work here was in box design. At different parties, we switched out the objects inside and just wrote up new cards for them.

At its debut, we played until a very competitive player broke the box (Sydney). Three people vowed to make a wood box! One was going to order it made with holes for eight players!

I delivered. Nice magnetic clasp lets you get in there to change out the contents. The flaps at the holes are not great, but I ultimately stapled black fabric and that works ok.

I think this is my first “classy” hinged wood box.

Installations

Cars

For our “Trafficstice” themed house party, I made a tiny traffic city we could drive RC cars around with reckless abandon.

RC cars are fun and affordable. But they’re not that fun. I think a much larger city would help, but would it be worth the space? We discussed running this again later in the summer but I opted not to get involved.

However, this was a good format for an activity at a party. It occupies a room that’s otherwise a bit awkward, gives people something obviously silly to do, and needs no explanation, rules, or moderation.

Cones

This was a depraved idea from before lockdown. I actually drove around in February 2021 picking up cones from the side of the street. The concept is that you walk across some cones but they are actually partying and kind of wasted. Mechanically, it’s Mr. Potatohead and you can swap out the parts.

The purple bucket had more accessories, but was ugly. I should have done better than a bucket. Overall the execution quality here wasn’t that good, which I think hurt the project. This is fun, but requires a fair amount of space and I’m not in a rush to use it again. People didn’t interact with it enough for me to be excited about it. It’s a nice visual and an easy bonus project. Next time I run it, I hope to make better props (these are papier-mâché which is ok but not great). And I need something better than the purple bucket. Also a sign explaining that you can change out the parts would help!

Feral Dirt Children

In 2021, I picked up 20 8' bamboo sticks for free and wanted to experiment. This project was bamboo-intensive, lightweight, and fun. I named it after Renee’s affectionate shorthand for our oeuvre: feral dirty children. Basically, we are good at things that are feral, dirt-related, and childish.

These are about a dollar per stick at Big Daddy’s farm store in Ukiah.

Papier-mâché spearheads are very easy and beautiful. The body is just a cut fizzy water box. The papier-mâché wrap holds the thing together very well. Silver and grey spray paints do half of the work. Surprisingly, these are durable and can even handle rain . They do fail quickly underwater, though!

The feral dirt children’s tent had a lot of spears. And an old pirate flag.

I made about 20 outfit pieces and 20 jewelry items in the feral style, hoping to outfit a tribe of reckless savages.

Renee prowling the installation, complete with the skull pile from Q2.

The hut served tea, grape juice (with gin), tea cookies, and sandwiches. We had instruments and toy swords for playing.

The red bunting strip killed it. I need to make more of those. Also pouring tea on yourself while on the muddy grass by the side of a lake is delightful. As you can see, it’s basically a beautiful day and we have a picnic.

Overall, this “special zone where your friends can dress as the characters” project was too remote. Ideally, diving into the characters/world should be a fun and convenient way to enjoy the party. It should not come at the cost of enjoying the greater event! I usually do better at this, but was attracted by this particularly well-suited grassy beach.

Actually, at the same event we also ran Rats again, which was a blast. It was just whatever we wanted to play with on a table by the main kitchen area at night. Folks swarmed it for hours. Sadly, I had no photos, but there also wasn’t any original art. We just ran the same stuff in new place with an old sign (the Rats sign) and old lights (chandeliers) and had a good time! Setup and strike were very easy also.

Explorey Rides Again

A few of us caught COVID before an event in July and cancelled all our plans. When we tested negative the day before it started, we reached out to the organizers and got our grant allocation back! It was back on!

We ran mostly the same project we had a month before, but with a quarter the team and half the content. We had new board games, for those who had spent time with us at previous events.

Here we are basically exploring the practice of bringing the same art to many events. It’s more efficient in many ways, but we’re in it for the novelty so don’t want to run the exact same project over and over!

Bulb Art

Sealed these books with glue, which was pretty labor intensive. Then painted on the letters to spell COVID.

At this point in time, feelings about COVID had become rather ambivalent. It was still killing, still dangerous, but also more fun to ignore. This message was meant to remind you of COVID, but give it the connotation of something in a hardcover book that you maybe read in school. Or maybe you never actually read that book but you carried it around and pretended you had read it. Anyway, these days you don’t actually spend any time in books like these, even if you know they are probably saying things that are true and important.

Albany Bulb art is still close to my heart. However, at this point, I’ve learned that I don’t have very strong collaborators for the Bulb. It’s often windy and cold. It’s far away, so when we arrive people are often preoccupied with finding a bathroom or snack or hiding from the wind. This particular time, two people panicked and had us trying to leave as soon as possible. It would be nice to get out there with only diehards, then build something really cool!

Anyway, at this point I kept the projects lightweight. Mostly fastening pre-made art to trees.

I also had these leftover Fucks to give, so put them on this weird eyeball tree.

Bats

In September, I started work on my next major installation. This is the very my first framed work of trash and first decorative bat for the project (just something I bought). It turns out that the trash my house produces is not very good aesthetically at communicating the idea of trash. Efficient plastic packaging for large containers of argugula or chicken thighs doesn’t say trash. A walk around my neighborhood earned me these more iconic pieces of Newport cigarettes packaging and a very small size of McDonald’s fries.

This project falls almost entirely under Q4 of 2022, but I did do something on it during Q3.

Something Else

The annual party I started with a couple friends continued into its 5th year. We run this party so we don’t have to go to Burning Man and can still have a fun and exciting time that same weekend. Organizing this party reminds me how I used to spend so much time doing administrative work just to get the opportunity to spend a little bit of time making weird art for the fun audience. Luckily, these days, I mostly get to work on the art and just occasionally have to run the circus.

Sharing the administrative work is one of the biggest benefits of collaborating with others on art. Also, they are better at the emotional labor required to collaborate with most humans.

There are still some fun opportunities to do art-like things. Here I did my Department of Public Works job of designing and printing parking passes. I went with legal size green and red. Incredibly, the red ones are green sheets that have been spray painted! You can also see me playing with logo design here, which was becomign an increasingly common part of my art.

Carbon Dating

Mostly I don’t bother making new things for this party. I trot out the tried and true projects that can help the most people have the most fun without any staff. However, I jumped at this chance to execute a project based on a funny name Gene came up with: “Carbon Dating.”

Sophie and I developed this content and made it happen. For the prom night at the party, we had these forms at the bar. You fill out a one-page form (double sided) that has ridiculous questions about you, then I grade and match them, then we try to get you to meet your Carbon Date match and go on a carbon date. (It turns out that grading quizzes quickly is a rare skill, which makes it harder to scale and decentralize this project.)

Some people made new friends from this, so I’d consider it a success!

People loved talking about this. The one where you rank how rude 10 things are was especially strong.

A month later, I ran this with Sophie at a Burning Man dust-off mixer and it was fun there too. However, a major lesson for me in these dating projects is that hetero men will spoil all the fun just to avoid going on a date with another man.

In the past, I ran OMGCupidLite at a zoom party, which resulted in one date. Later, I ran a Seven Minutes in Heaven game that almost created a new relationship. It’s always unclear what you’re accomplishing artistically, but I like to aim for “people have fun right now and something changes long term.”

Overall, my art work tends to improve the social lives of people who are involved, which is good for their mental health and basically helps them “get a life” that is better than what they had otherwise. I tested this concept in 2013 with “Fool’s Errand,” a theme camp that presumed running a theme camp full of art was pointless. It turns out to be quite significant for those involved! Probably more significant than anything else I could do for the same people.

Friendship Park

Classic project, back for another party. It’s just a table covered in activities with cute lighting. The position is key here: it’s on the path to the late night stage, but you can go here to talk more easily with friends or stop here if you’ve followed friends to the stage but don’t actually want to dance.

Also, I love running this table and have a bunch of activities to offer. Additionally, it’s a great reload station with booze and snacks.

Setup and strike is basically just covering a table in books and toys and games. I think many of my projects have retired to the library at Friendship Park.

Populate Pangaea

Classic project I copied from someone years ago. I make the board and sign, provide air-dry clay, and you make the dinosaurs. This has been fun at the event every time and is an easy way to get people to engage and make something.

This year, we put this game right by the bar. I think that’s a good spot for it. It’s good to have something to do near the bar.

Dinosaur Shooting Gallery

Another classic. I first ran this in 2021, at my last party before COVID lockdown. It’s fun and interesting enough. I could make it better. But mostly it’s nice to shoot things with a gun sometimes.

Reflections

Steady output. In this period I explored bamboo, more games, RC cars, cones, spears, and different ways to bring almost the same project to multiple events.

I’m getting better at this stuff, but I also hope I’m showing a path for others.

• Build out projects that motive you
• Build them all year round, not just in the week before they’re due
• Reuse things that work
• Ditch things that don’t (be realistic, if it’s not a hit, it’s probably a flop)
• What “works” can be roughly measured as “how many people” multiplied by “how much fun did they have on average” divided by “how hard was this for us to produce”
• Learn new mediums that are cost-effective and interesting to you
• Use art to improve your self and things close to you such as home, car, and clothing (I don’t cover clothing art in these retros)
• Doing art is like doing exercise, it helps your mood over time and makes you more interesting to other people