Mail Art Piece #2, prep stages

I've been coming across various sized stacks of paper and printouts from a time period about 8 years ago when I was doing a lot of graphic exploration, mostly using non-Adobe methods. I've been working these earlier pieces into new compositions, including a new mail art piece. Mail Art Piece #1 is still in progress. I'll make a separate blog entry about it.

Mail Art Piece #2 is based around some old mailers I found that I wanted to make use of. Mailers are great, you can put anything in there and it becomes a package, plus the mailer itself becomes part of the art. Simple principle, it all depends on how you want to expand upon it. So here are some photos documenting the progress so far.

The mailers themselves. There were four of them, so that was the determining factor for the edition. Mail Art Piece #1 was a run of about 20

Three pieces of photocopied collage, which were put on the scanner in eight random combinations

The eight page booklet which was made from the eight random scans

A glitched photo was desaturated and printed onto gold heavy weight card stock, then cut into four pieces.

Adhesive paper printed with patterns of fish and people.

The back sides of the mailers, with the label paper affixed.

 The whole piece will include the booklet, the gold card, a 30 minute cassette tape and a DVD-r. The content of the tape and DVD still have yet to be determined, but they will include elements and compositions that will vary in complexity and interactivity. The DVD will be both an object for viewing video content as well as a vehicle for other digital/data content.

One of the things I want to explore through the packing/packaging of this piece is using the surfaces of the physical components as ways to include content not directly associated with the primary content. A lot of different things will make reference to one another, and some content will be derived from other content within the package.

More details on this project as it continues!

Diggin Deep 020813

Once again we had a great night at Diggin Deep. Our guest Dj was Donovan Worland, who brought a nice stack of records and treated us to a variety of stuff. Donovan is one of the DJs in the Up Beat, the eugene Northern Soul guys. I'm a big fan of them and their approach, so it was definitely nice to have one of thier guys play with us. Here's the photo reel from the night. Photos by JD Casten.

New Video Projects

I've been inspired lately by a number of different avant garde film and video artists whose work I've seen lately, inlcuding the works of Fluxus filmmakers, the work of whom has been archived at http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html

I've also been successfully glitching photo images, now that I found out the quick and dirty way to glitched images. There's a youtube video explaining how to do it that I'll post a link to later. Having done so, I sequernced the images up into a simple video using Windows Movie Maker, then went about layering that video onto it self in different ways, attempting to make creative use of WMM's fairly cheesy palette of effects and transitions. Here's what i came up with so far, just a tester with no sound. The idea is that this will become part of some new projection art for future DJ or noise performances.

Also I've finished a long-form President Blair video called "Pink Noise/Geo Derm" which will available on dvd-r in the near future. here is the promo video for it.