Art I Made in Q4–2023
I lost my full-time job in September and had free time. I had a strong summer of great projects behind me, which yields a great team.
I had free time, I had support, I made much art.
Timeless Emporium
My main project was a time-traveling mall we did for a big art party event in November.
The mall needed a fair amount of overhead work. I threw together these museum-style fact boards about time travel. They were somewhat successful and quite easy to make.
We had such success with the Onion icon over the summer, I tried to pursue another logo that is also an emoji. Great branding move!
Foam core with color printing attached by spray adhesive. This has become a standard formula I use for indoor events.
The graphic design is easy for me and the manufacturing process is fairly painless. Just a couple hours and I make a whole pile of signs.
Hapi Hipi
I was so excited to build a TukTuk style mini vehicle hawking hippie wares from the 1960s for our time travel mall!
I had just lost my job so put in lots of time figuring out how to make this work and painting it. Realistically, this project took so much time that it’s hard to call it a success, even though it did work. I think a lot about whether a project that takes so much time is still a win, even if hundreds of people like it.
The chassis came together very smoothly, once I committed to using bicycle trailer wheels and a mismatched one from the thrift store. I later dressed them up to hide the spokes. I’m proud that this design worked.
I tried many techniques and just kept going to cover all critical surfaces with upbeat patterns of fire-retardant house paint.
I worked so much on construction and painting I didn’t have much time to develop the content.
The bongo drums were surprisingly popular. Also popular was just sitting in the front seat.
The back cabinet didn’t have much planned, so I displayed extra inventory and put the erotica book back here.
People say they want more meaning out of art, but I’ve found this to be untrue. When artists provide a statement of their intent, people tend to ignore or dislike it.
In this case, I considered why I wanted to make a Hippie truck and realized that I both look down on hippies for being ignorant and respect them for being gentle and virtuous. In this poster, I situate this ambivalence around the divider of class (education and money), spotlighting the redeeming qualities of squishy new age thinking.
I think this meaning is confusing and emotionally difficult to embrace, so was not popular. (The same thing happened with the Mallcop installation.)
This soured me a bit on the goal that “art should be meaningful” or even politically expressive.
Stick therapy was a hit and extremely easy to make. I collected a pile of interesting sticks, then printed out these directions to provide a therapy activity for you to do alone or with a friend.
Basically, people who get high in nature will explore the fascinating details of a stick at some point and play with it. It feels nice and lets you set your mind to something uncertain but essentially comfortable.
I’m glad this was the central activity of the truck. I think it could be presented to another audience with more production value to even great effect.
Mallcop
I was excited to build an annoying fake militarized Segway for our Time Travel Mall! As I explored private security for malls more, however, I became very sympathetic to security guards who get no respect, have very little power, and are tasked with handling the mall’s occasional and sad incivility, such as shopliftings and customers yelling about return policies.
The scooter is a tricycle built up with very lightweight wood and decorated in an upbeat solarpunk aesthetic. This was fun to build but I had no detailed plans and had to keep cutting more and more weird wood panels to make it work.
I got good at riding this thing, but it only went to one event and almost no one else rode it. Failed project.
Making fake retro technology was great fun. I don’t think any of this got much play. No one tried to use the coupon either.
I put together this laminated one pager at the last minute to guide people in interacting with the station. However, it basically asks you to roleplay as a cop and that is taboo these days.
I think this schtick would have worked if I had been willing to put in the hours playing the character. Instead, I tried to make it easy for people to walk up and it was too big a barrier to entry.
Across my art retros, I’ve noticed that I keep experimenting with how to get people to act more interesting, and keep refining my expectations. I want to be realistic: participant/visitors will not become this interesting and compromising character just because I make them a cool vehicle, a bunch of props, and a clever script to generate funny interactions. At least they’ll play with sticks!
Cows Helping Cows
My third mall stall was a sham. Really, we were going to close off part of the exhibition space as back-of-house. I wanted to provide a ridiculous excuse, so explained that this would have been Cows Helping Cows, but they had to close due to safety violations.
The backstory, circuitously laid out in posters and this pamphlet, is that, in the future, sentient cows travel back in time to liberate past cows from oppression using violence.
This is another one with a clear political meaning. But not very popular. The initial presentation seems incredibly dumb, because cows seems intrinsically stupid. But the joke is that at some point they become sentient and then are back for revenge because, of course, humans have treated them so brutally for so long. Today, the poor treatment of cows stands out as one of humanity’s biggest avoidable blunders. Deforestation, global warming, and mass cruelty just to provide a single type of food to the world’s wealthier eaters.
Flotsam & Jetsam: New York
I helped out on Elise’s stall, designing the logo and branding as well as making many of the clothes. This logo came from some early AI concept art and I thought “I could make that.” It turned out to be pretty labor intensive, but there it is. Very strange and specific.
This format worked great, but the plan to staff it fell apart and it just went from “not for sale” until “clearance; everything free” on the last day. This worked pretty well! Jelly and Sophie also made a lot of the pieces on offer here.
I was especially fond of this hat and shirt combination! I saw someone wearing this red shirt later at the event and it made me happy. I kept the hat. Well, it was too big to fit anyone else, so I should be more careful about that when making future hats!
I’m pretty good at making unique art clothes, but just don’t find it that motivating.
Stuff Shack
I helped out Dave with the graphic design here, copying Radio Shack assets and making a template that could populate from a spreadsheet. I also did a writing session with him, writing craziness for these labels! I think Andie did the brand design.
This was a very successful formula, letting Dave put up basically anything with a silly label. He established a platform that makes clever writing get laughs.
This is very similar to the Museum of Unnatural History I curated in 2018. There we had very unique objects with silly museum labels. Here we had fairly ordinary objects, but higher production value labeling.
Santa Booth
I promised to make this tree to support Corey’s Mall Santa project. I thought about a lot of designs and this one came to me at the last minute. It was very quick to build and is capable of holding gifts!
I made a different style Christmas Tree the year before and after, so the “lightweight efficient Christmas Tree” is a formula I continue to refine annually.
Tentacle Zoetrope
Tyler’s project was very complex and called for a zoetrope with an animated figure rotating on a record player, illuminated with a variable speed strobe light.
I offered to make the figures and had fun producing this series based on The Day of The Tentacle, an adventure game from my childhood. I sculpted the body and then separately the suckers, eye, and eyebrow. Then I painted them separately and combined them with tweezers and hot glue.
Ultimately, the zoetrope exhibit was cancelled so I threw these guys away.
Spiderverse
Our project also included a weird twist: time traveling spiders. For this, Renee and Rochelle put together a puzzle linking several installations. I also did this installation using our old cheapie bats and our new cheap spiders! Halloween decorations are fantastic: affordable, compelling, easy to install and cleanup.
For some reason I missed, Tyler insisted on the beef netting, so Jelly spent many hours getting it to specification. There it is. I’m not sure it was worth the time, but it’s not bad!
Putting up spider webs on the stairs was a good trick. We were new to the medium then, but spider webs are a great way to create decorative filler and transform a space.
Sunday Watermelon
For SF Decompression, Renee applied with this silly booth we’ve run before. The joke is that, at Burning Man, someone often presents one or more watermelons on the last day of the event and then walks away from the responsibility of cutting the melon and feeding it to people. They act like they are giving a gift, but they are really just dumping more work onto others.
Almost no one understands this joke, but I made these cute paintings lining the stand and we already had a silly dice game wherein you get an outcome such as: a slice, a slice you have to curse then can eat, a slice you have to feed to someone else, or no slice. Shockingly, most people at this event are angry not to get a slice! I guess they feel that they’ve paid to be at the event, so all interactivity should just provide consumer satisfaction rather than chance. I suppose also that, to them, the watermelon is the point, not the setup, interaction, or people.
When they got mad, I told them to play again, but Renee would just give them a slice.
How to Order Food book series
In 2019, I made a fake book that just had a cover and was an empty box inside. One was How to Order Food at a Restaurant, a topic I thought needed no great explanation. But as I learned how to print books online and experimented with AI image generation at work, I realized I could make a whole silly book like this.
I loved this book, but it was not very popular. I believe I sold 0 copies of this one, which is pretty bad performance. The style was based on corporate vector art, and the text is very disorienting, inspired by How to Punch a Whale, which was a huge hit.
So, anyway I made a sequel! That’s what it’s like when I love a project. Even if no one else likes it, I go ahead and make more sometimes! In this case, the first book didn’t get much of a showing before I dove into the next one.
How to Order More Food at a Restaurant was very popular. Each picture is pleasing, the story-telling is more coherent, and the AI image generation does very well with showing happy people with large amounts of beautiful food. For this one, I switched to all “painting” prompts, mostly acrylic and oil but using some variety. I just think paintings are great at showing tasty food in a compelling and intriguing way.
Goblin Family Tree
I’m terrible at drawing likenesses, but here I had to learn fast how to make decent portraits of my friends as goblins.
I found this weird tree in a thrift store and drew on the goblins by hand.
This was an idea concocted with Dana about how to show Sophie appreciation for her work directing and supporting our projects overall! She tends to take on lots of “boss” roles such as administration, project management, and negotiating with various other teams the rest of us don’t even talk to. She often finds herself playing “unappreciated boss” and feels saddled with emotional labor and the responsibility to own conflict, despite her effort to help everyone feel good together. It’s stressful to be the boss, but really we need someone to do the work!
I started this with Andie, then finished it up and delivered it as a thank you from the group.
Portraits of Beasties
Thinking of art for the 2024 year, I was excited to imagine a world of anthropomorphic hyperintelligent animals as friends!
I started by copying images from the web and found a childish idiom suitable for my storytelling.
The vision was to show one animalistic picture under the frame’s glass, then another “civilized” one on the glass itself. This is the usual trope for this topic: the tension between animal and civilization, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Sadly, the painting on top was too thick so the depth of this strategy was lost entirely and I just had silly pictures of friendly animals.
Well they were pretty good and I took them to many events where people liked them. They even got plaques later to give them a name and a shred of backstory!
Creepy Snowmen
Air dry foam clay is cheap, easy to work with, and great for gatherings. Here I offered the chance to make Creepy Snowmen, providing tiny hats, carrots, and twigs. People made nice freaky things! This is inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, where Calvin is always making snowmen who have lost their head or are part spider etc.
Sadly, this particular batch of clay was too goopy and the sculptures melted as they dried. Too bad, I had such luck with the bunnies earlier in 2023.
Wintry Quest
I worked with Tyler to rewrite his SideQuest3000 game to have exclusively wintry Christmas content, then we set up in this backyard office at a house party! What fun!
People fought penguin snipers and ran from the abominable snowman. It was good! But the game requires a lot of energy to run, as you still have to DM a game with a bunch of strangers who just got their characters.
Villains
For New Year’s Eve I wanted to put together a big house party and we needed a theme. Villains is quick and appealing, providing a clear aesthetic and many familiar references. We also got to spin the story that villains had stolen art from other events and were going to show it all now.
I put together these black cardboard frames to hold portraits of various villains I admire. They hold an image printed on Legal Size paper, so they’re easy to use and replace.
This worked out great and was fun and easy to do.
I put together this puzzle based on an old concept that had nagged me for years: what might be an evil trait in one person is a desirable ideal for another.
The puzzle is very simplistic and my goal was that someone could solve it with no pen very quickly. The various words were each printed to stand alone on a single page in the same hallway with this puzzle. So you just had to match up the antonyms, then select the indicated letters and you get the answer.
I also threw together this room around the existing bed. Some goblin lumber, some plant cuttings from my street, some fabric I already had, some games and books from my collection.
A tarot reader set up shop in here so the place was active, which is good too. Here you see it with the overhead lights, but we used simple USB clamplights.
Reflections
This is just so much art it’s hard to summarize. I guess the theme that stands out to me is that I got very serious about finding the projects that have the best ROI and scale well to provide major impact.
There are very few “personal projects” here where the point is to make something then display it so I feel something. Similarly, there are very few that are supposed to be gifts, to provide a lasting emotional aura for someone in particular. They are ephemeral installations, or parts of installations.
The quantity is incredible, especially for just three months of work. I guess that’s kind of what it looks like when I don’t have a job. Work picked up the next quarter a bit, but this level of art output started attracting attention.