shelflife by visitor

1999. The Columbine shootings and the Trenchcoat Mafia who brought the war to the cafeteria against a foreground of possibilities in a future-unknown of mind-dicing via the personal computer, FPS videogames and KMFDM records were still piping hot in the collective conscious. Aaron Rose was re-re-re-opening the Alleged Gallery in its then-latest incarnation. A group show was slated. He’d faxed out the mission briefing and the mission was Coup d’État.

As scene troubnologist, I was saddled with making a low-rent, low-tech, anxiety-inducing invitation. Aaron gave me a single photograph, a show title and basically told me to go to town. Computer viruses were in the news daily. PC users were hating life. BIOS chips were being re-flashed in a string of particularly virulent infections and people were losing everything. The invite would capitalize on that and the prevalent tech-gimmick-lust via the lure of art as interactivity.

I made a set of four fonts that weren’t. They were more like autistic etch-a-sketches that only did one thing. If a user followed the instructions, each font would draw a different picture. Type out some crap. Type it out again with caps lock on. Select everything and change the font. That was the gist.

First, they’d draw a picture of Bill Gates–”gates=ham”. Then they’d draw a picture of Gates with the Piggly Wiggly face–”ham=gates” (Bill was in the news constantly–so much so, that in ensuing years, he’d be forced to step out of the Microsoft limelight to rest a weary army of publicists and go poorly do good for the poor). When an invite recipient selected the keystrokes comprising the two portraits, they were suddenly met with a pre-Columbine to-do list and an equation declaring that guns + jocks = a trenchcoat.

All good and well. However this… convenient and completely unplanned stroke of luck fell into our laps. A vicious virus started infecting computers within days of the invite being mailed out. Anxiety came gratis in pre-Y2K America so long as your timing was right.

Here’s what we gave the people. I’m working on something completely apropos of this project right now. It involves me programing hundreds of IC chips and laser etching tons of tiny PC boards to make custom, compact, troublemaking circuits that I’m pretty certain nobody’s exploited yet…

Classic Olsen, Young, Dilloway lineup right at the height of their Ayler moment–free-noise on a sensible grid. For a minute, Wolf Eyes was rummaging around in the smoldering foundations of everything they’d gotten so good at annihilating–piecing the ruins back together again into something more elegant–cross-legged but panty-free, draped in noxious layers of soot and dust. Drop-dead visionary.

Shotgun Rorschach’s a glimpse at that. I shot the footage one night at Tonic. They had all of the lights out, which always makes for super-watchable video. The sound, however, was entirely other and compelled me to use it. I picked all of the moments where flashes, flashlights, flickers and lamps flowed into frame and dragged them out forever. This is an excerpt of the final collection of those frames. Insomnia? Try this. It’s an oxycontin lullaby.

note: There’s a possibility that the full-length DVD, some bonus objects and a special packaging concept may be forthcoming via a collaboration with Nate and Alivia at Aryan Asshole Records. 

In 2000, I was hell-bent on textile design, started thinking about mediums and made a decision. Rugs–I wanted to make rugs. I had no idea what to do with rugs or how to sell ‘em, but fuck it. I wanted to make rugs and everything would work itself out.

I ran the idea by Kern. He was stoked–particularly if he could lace them with models and shoot some porn. I asked if he’d consider trading promo photos for a rug. He sort of cackled a bit, smiled and huffed out a “yeah, man. That’d be GREAT!”

Sadly, I think I was only ever able to bring 4 of the 20-something designs over to him for shoots–but he shot the hell out of them. Honcho, Leg Show, JUGS, Hustler, Nerve–those rugs saw more carpet munching than a chaise at Plato’s Retreat.

Below are a few shots. I’ll add more as I scan the slides. I stopped manufacturing this series a few years ago. I’ve since moved on to Acts of God: Rugs for Lost Homes.

Rabbits, bikes and psychedelic moires… utopia? Hell yeah. What happens when a streetwear company rejects one of your drawings while you’re thinking about making some cycling jerseys? Efficiency! Who could possibly reject a long-eared rabbit wearing a torn, striped shirt and a safety pin necklace? I was hoping the answer was “my client.” I had plans for that hare.

I tracked down a cycling jersey manufacturer in the US and got them to make a small jersey edition–14 or so. I hate selling shit, so the plan for these jerseys was to trade them with friends. My rough guestimate of a percentage of people who follow through with trades when they’re given something in advance and are then put on the honor system to complete their end of the bargain clocks in somewhere at around 60%. PAY UP, FUCKERS!!!

Here are a couple of shots that Amadeo Lansky took last year while photographing a few of us riding rollers at a studio downtown. I’m on my custom Yamaguchi road/track hybrid timetrial bike.

SkipBox is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever made. It’s a 5-channel video / 10-channel audio project and sculpture. I designed and fabricated a console, mixing/recording apparatus for it and shot hours of footage of myself skipping rope around large pieces of public art and temporary pieces of street construction.

I had microphones in my shoes and on my collar. One would pick up the percussive rhythms of the different surfaces I skipped on while the other recorded my breathing, little mantras I’d repeat or vocalizations I’d make. These would then each be routed to mixers that people interacting with the sculpture could manipulate. Additionally, I had built a little recording deck into the SkipBox console surface–so, blank cassettes could be purchased from the gallery to record mixes of the work as they were generated by visitors.

Each of the 5 channels of video has its own, independent set of video clips–and no two clips are of a matching duration. Each clip is as long as it had to be to skip full-circle around whatever was being skipped around. Each channel is also looped, so the image/sound structure is perpetually randomized.

I still have a small edition of different tapes that I made with the machine available. I’ll add them to the store one of these days. Each tape is signed and numbered. The artwork is inked sneaker and jumprope on paper.

The sculpture and a tiny collection of the vids are below. Sadly, the quicktime lacks the audio distortion that the amp in the sculpture provides. Sadlier, the clips are also microscopic, so you lose a lot of the sense of scale and setting that make all of the featured skipjects so beautiful.

In July of 2004, Vincent and I sat down for three weeks of all-night design sessions. We were grinding thru the posters for The Brown Bunny. The designs needed to capture the sublime simplicity of the film’s aesthetic and not much else.

I showed Vinny my copy of El Lissitzky’s Suprematicheskii Skaz pro dva Kvadrata v Shesti Postroikakh. We obsessed over its paper stock and how gracefully it patinad. That’s what we wanted for the Bunny posters–guaranteed age-induced color-shift; rich, multiply-hit passes of spot color; chunky, visible halftones and posters that would take at least 2 days to dry off the press.

Somewhere between debates about conservation, philanthropy, politics, porn, architecture, grindhouse cinema, clean food, jazz and how to fix Africa, we actually got some work done. Neither of us knew or cared enough to spell Chloe’s last name correctly until a few days before going on press. Spelling… MINUTIA!!! Speaking of which… we bickered about design minutia constantly. Tears rolled down our cheeks when we discovered we couldn’t have the text flocked on one of the posters. We indulged in the shame brought to the Hasidic pre-press guy who tried to hide the erection that the blowjobs and rape imagery in the cd booklet gifted him.

I once tried to figure out how many pounds of goji berries, green tea, Greens Energy Bars and powdered green/red superfood concentrate we gorged on to end up with the posters below, a dumpster full of abortions, a few 30′ tall billboards and some CD packaging. It could have fed a village or raised a child.

I don’t really recall the context of the request–which isn’t unusual of anything involving Dylan Nyoukis, but I was asked to provide Chocolate Monk with an album of my tracks. Tracks? What the fuck?

I don’t know how exactly Dylan was made aware that I’d been recording anything. I may have slipped him a CD-R at a show at the Knitting Factory that he was in town for, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the details on this one.

So, tracks… I had these microcassette tapes I had been recording. They were analog synth and vocal experiments. There were two distinct avenues I was exploring–pedal processing (usually just delay and phase) and pedal/synth processing, but in both cases, the fundamental signal being manipulated was just voice–none of this bleep-bloop synth stuff. I wanted to keep everything human.

I pulled together a set of tracks–evenly split between the two concepts I’d been playing with. I named each track for the designer of a chair that best suited the sounds. Dylan actually released it. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve only ever performed the material live once–at the No Fun Fest. It was a battle between Mokinox and Glamorous Pat. We both ended up naked in a room full of a couple-hundred confused onlookers. I had an inverted crucifix taped to my dick and was smashing Jesus on a contact mic. I lost him that night–Jesus. I still have the cross, but I don’t think it’s technically a crucifix anymore if ol’ J.C.’s given up the ghost.

A little-known tidbit is that the interstitial, title and credit noise on the FUN FROM NONE No Fun Fest DVDs I did for Load Records is from the unreleased Mokinox cassette, Cherbourg.

STARCK.MP3

VAN DER ROHE.MP3