Art I Made in Q3–2023

The late summer is a time of transition for my art, where I take around projects on the main summer theme and start developing for the smaller second season of Fall. It was really in Q2 that our team got big and strong, so during this period we kind of had too much stuff and not enough people.

Goblins Again

The goblin project began in Q1–2023 and at this point we were mostly bringing out new mixes of the same stuff. This was really fun, but just because you’ve done it once doesn’t mean it’s quick or easy to do!

At the Next Event

For this one, we had a much smaller crew and less budget, but some contributors insisted we try to do it all! This burned out our main workhorses, a major lesson for me. Still, the reputational benefit of pushing so hard did reward us in future years.

Ramshackle build with monstrous teeth, bookshelf. The onion lamp in foreground, left is a new design that worked pretty well but was lost in the space.

Here’s our installation at another big summer event. It looks fairly bare and ramshackle during the sweltering daytime, so was basically only active at night. At night, it had the deepest interactions so held a lot of attention for lots of time. It’s such a joy to make a place that I would want to hang out at a party!

I made the first print of this book by hand because my online publisher has long turnaround times. This was a huge amount of work and much higher cost, but the handmade book is somewhat charming.

The new Goblin Aesthetics book was really exciting to me, but I already wrote about it for Q2. It was good to practice handbinding again, after doing it for The Carrot Seed in 2022, I used it again in 2024 also. The tricky part is how to make it painless and pretty!

Somehow RFP got skipped in my Q2 review (there was so much art), but that one is a card game where the dealer says “here is the party theme” and all players pick from their cards their best pitch of a themed experience that would help the party succeed.

We had a dry table for games and books and a wet table for onions and owl pellets. For this event, it was unbearably hot and we had access to a spigot, so Gene added a pool! That helped, but it was still too hot and few people visited by day.

On the last night we ran our “this is fine” flip and a pirate shp visited while we played the board game of Relationships we’d made earlier that year. Nice ship!

One More Time

At the Something Else festival that many of our goblins help run, we broke up Goblin content into several zones.

Here was the main latenight hangout spot, presenting the activities that people tend to like most at midnight to 6am.

Our overall design was to have a “goblin park” that was mostly a wall. This didn’t hold up to wind, because walls really need deep anchor points. Structures (like a shack) do much better because they are basically cubes. You can also see notes here for “Feral Goblin” which was another structure at the lake that Sophie lead.

One artist liaison we worked with referred to this game as one of our “janky lawn games.” It was very popular and here was placed it by the downtown bar, where people figured it out and played it together quite often! It’s so satisfying when users can figure things out without instructions!

GOblin balloonist returned and flew around the party a bit.

Craft Station

For another event, I had no committed collaborators so tried to keep a small scope with folding tables, an ez-up, and some crafting activities. This worked and, later, a ceramicist joined to offer up pottery spinning to all comers, taking over only about a third of my space. This project was great, but even when there is nothing to do, most people, even artists, still choose not to work on craft projects. I usually overestimate the energy and skill of participants, but am working on it!

In this case, a few people engaged and ended up with cool creations they go to keep! To me that was still worth it. I don’t think I could have gotten others to jump in for a more fun interaction of any kind.

I made this lantern with tape onsite, inspired by someone’s cute goth lantern. Now I use it this tape thing at home! I am basically working in “tape mache”, using a balloon armature covered in plastic wrap then covering it in tape.

Tape Dinosaurs

Getting deeper into tape, I had found that I can make pretty ok dollies out of nothing but wadded up paper wrapped in tape and painted. Here I tried to turn this into a game for Something Else, complete with electric fences based on those in Jurassic Park. Sophie and I had a nice time running this for a while with a few adult visitors, but mostly kids just played with the toys or tried to make something and it turned out quite poorly.

Touchy Feely Lounge

This project was just a way to repackage existing content for another event. This event usually did not feature very much art or many late night activities, so I painted this nice sign and we hung white fabric from ropes in the trees, then setup skeeball, a custom board game, a DnD machine, and someother cool stuff! This worked as a night time hot spot, very active for a few hours each night.

Sophie and Tyler ran their projects quite well, encouraging others to play and showing what fun we can have together with art to catalyze fun party interactions!

Miscellany

Upgraded the pyramid tables from the late night stage. Experimented with new lights for them, but the onion style is really still better than the new “box with sillhouette.”

Amazingly, the last of my Biogredable Skulls finally made it to the Free Box where they were quickly taken. My original concept that “all art becomes trash so let’s make it compost” was wrong. Classic desireable objects such as fake skulls do not have to become trash. I can always find someone else who wants them next. A great lesson! In 2024, I did another bath of papier-mâché and made it to last!

Preparing for a Big Q4 Project

Wall Decor

Most of my art is based on a concept I find exciting, that I then turn into an interaction meant to turn normal people into fun revelers. In this case, I was simply trying to take up space in a room where we’d eventually be deploying a lot of art. These ideas were copied from art I saw in an art space in San Francisco.

I liked the bright colors, but Sophie was my most active collaborator here, offering feedback when no one else did, and she likes black a lot. So I ditched the trippy color patterns!

This style was also inspired by the recent Infinity Wars movies, which feature lots of suckers and machines that project things (such as spider web, nanobots, force fields). The idea was to deploy these around the edges of a space and claim that they held us in place temporally, part of a larger time machine. As usual, such narrative concepts never impacted the audience.

These “blob paintings” were helpful at taking up space and mostly went up in the bathroom and on top of existing Hotel Art. The main lesson from this was that my acylic paints had poor coverage! A few months later, Sophie bought me new ones! Thanks!

Tiny Hats Test Run

Warming up the concept of a “Tiny Hats for Tiny Pets” market stall, we took this activity to an in-town party and found that almost everyone can walk up and make a tiny hat! This shocked me because I had such poor results asking them to make dinosaurs, which I see as a far easier job. It’s a good reminder that more conventional objects are easier for the audience to work with, and that “cute” is a strong motivator for many people! My work generally tries to avoid “cuteness,” basically looking down on it as insipid and without value. It gets the people going!

Model for a Fake TukTuk

I love working in cardboard at this scale, especially for boxy machines like a truck. This took a couple of hours and was meant to demonstrate to collaborators what a tiny tuktuk might look like and how I could build one with framing lumber and plywood. I don’t think they paid much attention, but I learned a lot from this model and kept it around for a while because it is really charming.

Book of Future Technology

What a cute, ambitious project! We wrote a book cataloging the critical technologies from the year 2000–3000, including spaceflight, time travel, cloning, and weird BS we thought was funny. This shipped as about 60 technologies with a furious and dismissive foreword from an imaginary competing academic.

As a kid, I loved exploring fantasy and science fiction worlds, but never cared about the storylines or characters. I just wanted encyclopedic lists of ideas with details about what they were and how they interacted, like D&D’s Monstrous Manual. Here I got to make one! This was a massive effort, requiring a lot of writing and a pretty heavy editorial load to get it all into a book format and printed.

Overall, I’d consider this a failure as interest in the deliverable was very low. I think this was too intellectual a project, even though it’s targeting what I’d consider a pre-teen desire. We sold about 5 copies online.

I was excited to explore a technological milestones from a science fiction world I’d created years ago. These were critical technologies in that world, slowly transforming humans into more efficient homeostatis consumers of experience.

Ryan and Leah were enthusiastic contributors who wrote on very different topics!

AI Generated, Vaporwave, Hippie Erotica

Just after losing my job, I decided to leap into this weird concept I had of a book full of AI generated hippie erotica focused on South Eastern Asia. I had been inspired by a Facebook Page about hippie lifestyle out of Cebu, Philippines. I loved the candid jungle pics of skin and ganja. They were shot on old cameras, a look I don’t see much these days, and focused on people finding peace and kinship outside the capitalist built environment.

AI image generation in September 2023 was not strong at erotica, and most models banned it. Also my collaborators strongly discouraged me on this project, because it depicted mostly Filipino, Indian, African, and Chinese people.

(Because I am white, people often have a problem with me trying to explore non-white people and places in my art. I revile making more images of white bodies, stories in white culture, and repetition of the Euro-American imaginary. Here, I struck a compromise by adding in a bunch of European white “models.”)

This book was not widely read, despite huge success with goblin smut earlier this year. The only people I saw read it cover to cover were the safety leads at the event where it premiered. They both came by to tell me how much they liked it!

The best art is usually going to be high effort, high reward. But most swings don’t hit, so I end up with old projects like this. With a book, even if it boms I can still add it to the collection of surprising art books. Then I deploy that in some corner of another installation. Packs small, can entertain for a while, reusable, and helps build out a large and diverse library of books you’ve never seen before. (At some point around 30, I was so bookish that it was a treat to find an entire shelf with no books I’d seen before.)

This one required swapping Photoshop automation files with Andie, so we could both try out a series of filters and modifications to an image, then do a batch applying it to all 100 pictures that made the final cut.

Reflections

As the creator of so much work, I mostly notice the projects that weren’t love and the processes that went wrong. Other people have the impression that my work always kills, because they only notice that I did something if their friends are agog about it.

There are a lot of factors that decide what projects succeed. A few I notice in reviewing the art above: weather, the crowd, the other activities at the event, crew strength, hype about the project coming in, framing, lighting, overall strength of your cluster, and barrier to entry for the participant. I’m getting better at controlling these, but the real emphasis during this period was making a ton of cool stuff.

Shortly after this period I got way more interested in budgets, management, and crew experience. But at this point, I was still just focused on the art. Good times!