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Crap Art: Daegu
(29 Mar 2009 at 13:03) |
Annyong! In 2001 I wrote the Crap Art Manifesto and left it lovingly unupdated since then. The only thing I've really ever done for that is the (fairly successful) Album-A-Day Project (why not make a project into a Movement? all it takes is a manifesto!), but from time to time I hear about things that others have done, which I think is great. My favorite so far is "Crap Art: Daegu", a 24-hour creation festival held in Daegu, South Korea a few weeks ago. Here's their poster:
Basically they got a bunch of space and art materials, then for 24 hours (Friday the 13th) anybody could come and participate in free-form collaborative or individual art in various rooms in this place, then the next day they had a showing of that art with some bands playing too (Pi Day). The money raised went to charity. It sounds like it was really successful. They've got a bunch of photos and video from the event that's collected on their blog. My favorite is a local television piece about the festival. (Click on 2009-03-21 and fast-forward to 36:00 or so.) It's mostly in Korean but there are a few interviewees speaking in English too. I find it very surreal and it makes me wish I was bilingual. (screen grabs for lazies) |
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Merry Christmas, Action Jackson
(26 Dec 2008 at 23:28) |
Two independent sightings of my font Action Jackson in the same week! It's having a good Christmas. First Moira sent the following totally sweet Pterodactyl t-shirt on her nephew:
That's my font at the bottom. The shirt looks pretty pro but the hollow insides of the letters are strangely filled in with yellow. I don't really understand how that mistake is possible. Still if they make it in Kid's X-Large I gotta get me one of these. Next Nels spotted and then kindly returned to take photos of the font being used in New Orleans Arena at a Hornets pro-basketball game. Here it is up on the big screen and also scrolling annoyingly in every addressable part of the periphery:
1024×768 version
(It occurs to me that with a name like Action Jackson, the popularity of this font might just be from its abecedarian advantage.) Anyway I love sightings to the max, so please send them if you snag 'em! |
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Old book bindings
(29 Jan 2008 at 00:32) |
Since voting has ended, I can now brag that one of my photographs was a finalist for the Wikimedia Commons (this is the part of Wikipedia that hosts free-only graphics for the project) Picture of the Year competition. Predictably, mine didn't win—some of those other pictures are way better. Still, it was a nice surprise to find myself in the finals (out of 500+ images that were featured this year) and to finish in the middle of the pack.
By the way, if you're an amateur photographer, and especially if you've got a fancypants digital SLR, I recommend Wikimedia Commons as an outlet for your best work. You do have to use a free license (meaning that anybody can use your work, subject to some conditions), but unless you're expecting to sell your photographs this ought to be easy to get over. It's (1) a nice way to contribute to a useful resource and (2) a good way to get visibility for your work. For me these kinds of chance encounters (like spotting one of my fonts on a poster somewhere or seeing my photograph appear in a Wikipedia article I didn't work on) are probably the most fun possible outcome from making something. |
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PG Article
(16 Aug 2006 at 10:12) |
| There's a nice article about our programming contest in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (The print version has a bit more in it, like a code snippet from one of the programming languages.) |
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Destroy FX interview
(04 Aug 2006 at 18:23) |
755×2088 version I was cleaning out my room today and found this two-part interview of Destroy FX in the very cool and beautiful Spanish magazine Serie B. It is fun to see my words (which I don't remember; the interview was long ago) translated so that I can practice my high school Spanish to try to figure out what I said. Esto es punk! |
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Ah, to make a difference...
(08 Mar 2006 at 07:14) |
Jake asks, "Are you responsible for this, Tom?". (That blog is pretty fine readin', actually—especially if you can imagine the Pittsburgh accents for some of them.)
The answer is yes, of course, though the question (accompanied by a drawing similar to this) was actually, "Is it normal to sex a robot?" |
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The good kind of spam
(23 Dec 2005 at 23:14) |
The other day I got what appeared to be an unintelligible foreign-language spam mail, which I just happened to be absentmindedly staring at while I was talking to my officemate william. I was just about to delete it when the text "Tom7's world" somewhere in the body it caught my eye! It turns out this was an entirely topical e-mail alerting me to a Spanish magazine with an "article" about me. The magazine is called Y SIN EMBARGO and I think it is like a design magazine. This specific issue is about graffiti. Anyway, I think it is a really nice looking magazine, it has got my fonts all over it, and the article (which I can't understand, even with Babelfish) seems to be flattering. Some of the graffiti in there is pretty great, too. Their website is confusing and kind of fun to try to navigate, but a direct link to the zipped PDF/ebook may prove useful. (None of the linux PDF readers I had could read this, but Acrobat 6 on Windows seems to work.)
PS. Merry xolidays everyone! |
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The seltzer king of Pittsburgh
(08 Aug 2005 at 15:34) |
Barry Joseph, the "effervescent Jew", has a web site so singularly devoted to seltzer that he cannot let one song that mentions the drink go uncatalogued by his project. On my 13th album-a-day I have a song called "Seltzer," and so, the logical conclusion is a 15-minute interview of me about the song in his aptly named podcast, "Give Me Seltzer!"
An intriguing project...
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Pi day... awesome!
(14 Mar 2005 at 12:09) |
Happy Pi Day (3/14), everyone!
Back in 1999, when I was an undergraduate, my math friend Dan Bruner and I decided that an appropriate Pi Day celebration would be to write as many digits of pi as we could on the sidewalk for everyone to see. We used really big digits and didn't have very much chalk, but we wrote about 888 (going from Wean Hall to the University Center) starting at 1:59AM, with our fingers freezing and our lungs wheezing at the end. In the following years we did the same, with more and more volunteers (once, our work was snowed on before daybreak!), each year doubling the amount of digits that we wrote, and also starting a bit earlier in the night and writing smaller. (Dan eventually graduated but I'm still here as a PhD student.) In 2003 we got 8192 digits with the help of about 20 people, which I thought of as the pinnacle of pi writing. When CMU moved its spring break to overlap Pi Day in 2004, and with most of my undergraduate friends graduated and most of my graduate friends working on their theses, I thought that would be the end of our chalking exploits.
Paragraph break for emphasis. I was wrong. Today I walked into campus to find that a group of CMU Pi Ninjas had picked up the disused torch, dusted it off, and carried on the tradition with aplomb; they had doubled our previous total to 16,384 digits!! I walked the entire route grinning. Fucking great job, guys. I am impressed, honored, and absolutely ready to have pi day chalking be an autonomous CMU tradition. Pi lives!! |
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Testify in Rice
(09 Apr 2004 at 10:24) |
I just saw this Wired Article talking about a site (webjay) that collects playlists of music that can be found for free on the web. My own song "Testify in Hockey" heads up the playlist dedicated to Condoleezza Rice called "testify." (That one is weird enough to be listed in the Wired article!) Speaking of Condi, she came across as extremely evasive in her testimony, as far as I'm concerned.
By the way, I think that services like Webjay (except much more sophisticated) are the future of music--not buying and selling digitally or physically. |
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