The Moustache to Cloud Project

--The 2012 Movement (Electronic Music Festival) Contribution--

The Mustache to Cloud project proposes a playful sculptural icon that serves as an identifiable rendezvous point, photo opportunity, and ultimately provides an interface for festival attendees to participate, with minimal effort, in a larger artistic exercise of frivolous connectivity.

The form and functionality of the project capitalizes upon festival attendees’ existing normative behaviors. First, the installation answers the near ubiquitous festival want for unique identifiable points within the grounds (vis-à-vis, “We’ll meet back up at that moustache installation at noon”). As identified in the illustrations on the following pages, the elaborate armatures of these pieces may serve as congregation points to that end. The subject matter of the icons (suspended oversized moustaches, of course) capitalizes upon a second activity common to the MOVEMENT experience: The seeking of opportunities for playful candid photographs. These installations provide that opportunity, riding on the coattails of the popular ‘moustache on a stick’ phenomenon. Finally, we press this documentation opportunity further by integrating a simple process to upload the candid photo to the cloud. In this sense, we take advantage of a third condition- utilizing festival attendees’ own technologies- Smart Phones- to enhance the physical installation. The photos of one’s friends at the installation may be uploaded (via QR scanner codes on the sculpture itself) to a simple website of our design exhibiting an interactive map of interconnected moustache installation candids. In this, an individual’s interaction with the sculpture may exist beyond the event, both temporally and physically.

More Love at http://campdetroit.tumblr.com/

Past-y Blast-y 5: Another Conception of ‘Probable Space’

Yet another investigation of translations of urban conditions from determinate to temporally opportunistic. Perhaps this speaks to an inherent fear of finality (ie ‘Man enjoys achieving, but fears having achieved’). Perhaps this speaks to an inherent boredom with static mass architecture. Perhaps it’s just repressed sexuality.

(The quotation above fulfills my obscure academic reference quota for the month vis-à-vis Dostoevsky).

_NYAAOMDT (The New York Analog Archive of Mundane Digital Tidbits) 01

 
I submit for a primary premise that an archive is a sample set distillation and organization of objects of perceived long term value into Place. Therefore it is inherently an architectural exercise as much as it is an archeological one. Taking those variables to the extreme, nothing in contemporary culture has more potential archeological value, and is more placeless, then the mass of non-even digital material.

Now the condition is- is that in their native state, these tidbits are white noise in substantive content, even though they are incredibly dense in their ubiquity. (Perhaps because of their ubiquity there is no weight assigned to instance.) Furthermore, all these instances largely circumvent the designed environment.

The necessary explorations to validate a physical archive for the aforementioned content include efforts to 1) extract the digital tidbits and assign a quantitative value, 2) Attach the content to a destination and 3) Make it useful to posterity. 
 
The goal of the synthesis here is beyond just archiving a sample set of the cloud of 1s and 0s as a cultural record. The NYAAOMDT is ideally a forum to discover a more profound significance in our non-event experiences.

 
This goes on and on, but the point is made for this format.

The Over Engineered Pornographic Event.

In order to attach quantifiable value to normative digital background noise (Facebook, ITunes playlists, SMS, Like, Dislike, Dig, Poke, Tweet) we must explode the process to create ‘event’. By slowing the progression of experience and attaching physical properties otherwise foreign to digital background noise in its native context (weight, time) we may move the ethereal mass to fill Place and Context. The current condition of insignificant image as occupying a plane of dense quantity may be inverted- a focused quantity via engaged process yelling meaningful content per effort ratio.

The Over Engineered Pornographic Event. Part of an ongoing academic excesses to extract value from the digital mass.

 For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it. ~Sartre

Introducing: Corktown Studios.

The walls are a little crooked, the floor is less than consistently even, and the exterior vinyl siding is pretty asinine, but its finally a studio. More photos and event data on the Facebook platform, at which I am comically inept at operating:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Corktown-Studios/172256426220619

Thoughts while surgically extracting convex lenses from camera components:

“If I was truly aware of my mortality, I probably wouldn’t be doing this”   

And then in affirmation of- or in stubborn malice to- the fact, I proceeded to purposefully extract twice as many lenses than I actually needed.

Corktown Studios Teaser Trailer

Online Networking Presence-Onslaught to Follow Shortly

On The Placelessness of The Prescribed Environment. Part One: Foundations

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Unnecessarily Dense Academic Discourses Monthly, which is not a real publication; although I may have enough content on this blog alone to populate the first few issues (appropriately padded with full page Zoloft ads of course).

Serialized into three installments.

01 Foundations- Musing on the axiom that ‘Place’ and ‘Space’ are intermittently convergent terms through both productive and erroneous interdisciplinary translations, feedback, and interbreeding [not an a priori assessment, but an academically defendable one] a concern for the built environments that those like myself propagate tints and compounds. Geographer Edward Relph submits that ‘space’ is less a Cartesian container giving the character of shape to ‘place’ as it is a phenomenological dimension of the latter term- A tangible understanding of emotional and intellectual experience. While the professional disposition of those like myself, through self preservation perhaps, won’t allow for the complete dissolution of the container’s hegemony, this space-place relationship is unavoidable, both academically and colloquially.

In the same discourse, Relph later suggests that place [and, as ascertained above, space] may be experienced authentically as a “Direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places” or inauthentically via unrestricted acceptance of mass values and the resultant eradication of the distinct. This is where our concern here lies, for surely the domain of the image [the domain of those like me], both produced and resultant, is an agent of monotony and, as conjectured following, an operative dissolving not only authenticity, but sobriety, ethics, and even free intellect.

Giving Beer to Humans

...has never ignited a downward spiral of troubled scenarios or lead to failure, disappointment, or loss. And so, we please ourselves with distributing consequence-less joy this holiday (Christmas, Boxing Day) season.

McDUH Final Renderings

Component Peaks and Guest Posts

A few small- scale mock-ups of developed McDUH building-blocks. Another synopsis of this project is featured on the Make Lab Blog.

Re-DIFFA’d Table Fixture

That is to say, ‘Re- Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS’ installation, although I’m not sure if this table is still technically fighting AIDS…

Well…. I don’t have AIDS, and I own this table, so if we ignore the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy here, this table’s AIDS fighting days are far from over.

In addition to being an irrefutably effective treatment for AIDS, the material expression has been improved in quality and expression- Plank, Strut, Strap.

McDUH Typological Iteration #1 [Moneyshots]

The implementation will be toned down significantly prior to final iteration. In an effort to explore the possibilities of the program kit, it has been irigorously exercised/ pushed without regard to feasibility or even, necessarily, desirability.