LUA – CSM – MA CPfNE – ARUP – STEEP group – manual research aggregator (that’s a mouthfull!)

This is a link to the blog for the CSM – CPfNE – ARUP project STEEP groups and those of us who are too lazy to remember or bookmark the actual URL of the address (like me) and have to navigate to certain pages by retracing the series of links visited before stumbling upon the one you actually wanted.

cpfne-arup.blogspot.com

come to think of it, i am starting to navigate and remember the psychogoeography of nodes around the internet through the use of virtual landmarks (kinda like “go to boingboing, left on slashdot under the -1 modded troll comment in whatever article, click through the banner ad, straight to flickr and then right on the link found in the signature of the dude who started the google cached discussion about monkey-less bananas on the LastFM forum). it kinda reminds me of when i first moved to the netherlands.

not really being able to navigate around urban spaces like i was used to in toronto (the grid of streets found in toronto and other north american cities pretty much ment it was “up and over or over and up” to get to certain places. this personal navigational system was replaced by concentric circles of streets, twisty roads, bridges and dykes that radiated from the center where the church was and became the “where the fuck am i and where the hell am i going, but i am riding a bike so try not to think about how stoned you are or you’ll get crushed by the tram” system of dutch city way-finding), so i had to begin to remember the progression in which i came across certain landmarks in order to get to specific places like my favorite coffeeshop for instance, only to realize that all the while i was taking inefficient routes to places for years after friends native to holland would actually, physically show me that where i wanted to be was just around the corner and not around the city in a downward spiral movement… or maybe i couldn’t navigate that well because of time spent in the coffeeshops… ah, i can’t remember any more… i’m hungry..

…oh and yes, i know i could use del.icio.us… and i do. just to confuse myself even more i have two accounts and also aggregate all the fii_research material on the CPfNE-ARUP blog… for those who actually get all the diminutives and abbreviations, this post is for you. come to think of it, bookmarking the URL would have been easier by now since i have started to make this a full blown blog post. i will make sure to tag this in the “excuses for posting inconsistently” category… ok… shutting up…

…now.

my first assignment for CPfNE

this video was my contribution to the first assignment for my MA in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments (CPfNE) at Central Saint Martin’s College (CSM); University of the Arts London(UAL).

this was essentially a “get to know your peers” assignment in which i made a short stop-motion animation narrative of a colleague in the class. i had just a couple days to create it using a computer, dslr and mp3 player with microphone.

enjoy.

Technorati Tags: artist, villainous.biz, smallcaps, art, creative practice for narratice environments, london, video, youtube.com, designer, central saint martin’s

illustration friday

here is my first entry for illustration friday on illustrationfriday.com. the topic for this friday is “safe” and the title of my entry is “there is some mom in you yet”

better then have me tell you what this site is all about, here is a quote from their webpage:

Illustration Friday is a weekly illustration challenge. A topic is posted every Friday and then participants have all week to come up with their own interpretation.

Topics are picked each week from a list of suggestion that have been emailed by participants.

not only is illustrationfriday.com a platform for people to submit and get news about various creative issues, but it also maintains a forum where people can discuss all manner of topics regarding illustration, from technique to feedback, inspiration and more.

participation is open for everyone, even for illustrating posers such as myself. here is a link to how you can get involved.. not that i know any illustrators that would enjoy this project… smarch are you reading this? now if i could only convince them to publish my joiners…

Technorati Tags: illustration, illustrationfriday.com, art, artist, villainous.biz, smallcaps

ensche-daze AKi endexam 2006

i recently had a chance to return to enschede and found myself back in the city of my alma mater, and paid a long overdue visit to the community that raised me so well at the aki. i also spent a few days at the offmess (a former military air base turned squat house that i lived in during my final year in the aki) to help my friend danja vasiliev, aka binary.koala construct his endexam installation, PowerOnOff.

calling upon my much sought after skills of messy soldering and bad jokes, i helped danja where i could (like lifting things) and even picked up a few new skills (like putting things down) and also helped out with the much neglected process of documentation OF process (something all artists have problems with during the heat of creation… haha, i said “heat of creation”… uf.. too much family guy).

about the installation: the concept as i initially perceive it; for i wont get to see the end result until the end of the month at the opening, involves translating how ones actions in a virtual space (i.e. surfing the web) can affect the real-life or actual world.

about the artist: danja vasiliev – super cool (russian) guy, MPC colleague and brotha-from-anotha-motha. what can i say, like all good artists his work speaks for himself. he recently was invited to join the masters program at the piet zwart institute in rotterdam. congrats to you, man!

back to the installation: parts of the installation consist of an interface that is familiar, like a standard laptop and a common web browser, and also a custom built computer consisting of a GNU/linux installation and 7 optical relays that control the power given to all the chosen house hold devices that make up of the rest of the installation; hence the name PowerOnOff.

as an experience, the installation draws the viewer into an inclosed space initially deprived of light. once given a chance to ajust to the slight sensory depravation, an arrangement of standard household devices used everyday will become apparent in the space, presented on a stage. situated before the stage will be the laptop where people can surf. on another screen, an ascii readout of the behavioral patterns of the participant will be tracked.

as you surf you build credit for visiting certain websites. this credit is translated into energy that powers for instance the lights, fans, an old school audio tape reel recorder, a washing machine, etc., thus providing the resources to do things we take for granted every given day.

it is an installation that reveals the ever increasing transparency between our online and off-line existence, and also tries to address the fact that what we do in these two seemingly separate worlds (real and online) does in fact have an effect on one another, making the world we live in and the world we have “created” as one..

..well that was a’lil esoteric i suppose. anyways its soooo freaking cool (LOL!!) so check it out if you are in the neighborhood, OK?. visit the AKi’s webpage for more details, and i will of course follow up with updates on this humble weblog, eventually.

loose 5 months of work in 1sec. (or, never quite fits the same like the first time)

*achtung! Before proceeding, please consider the possibility of eminent hard drive failure and back-up all your important data immediately. This is your third final warning in this particular post. As a side *achtung! I also promise to not get emotional.

A couple days ago I was waking up in the kitchen (I “wake up” by drinking warm, caffeinated beverages. No, flat room temp. coke is not considered a warm, caffeinated beverage and no, I did not literally wake up off my kitchen floor. I have the floor in my bedroom for doing that), and had a black tea and a bowl of lemon yogurt for that meal between lunch and dinner, dunch. As I was chatting to smarch on skype, I experienced an abnormally long wait for what is widely known as the spinning beach ball of death. Using macs and computers in general for a number of years, I decided to execute the best know fix for such a predicament; I pressed and held the power button to initialize a hard reboot.

Curious about what was going on behind the apple aesthetic facade, I decided to boot the machine in verbose mode (command-v) to watch the start up echo and analyze why my computer was hanging. While it was initializing the swap partition, I was presented with the first clue:

Disk I/O error. Hummm… ok. I let it run a little longer to see if any other errors came up in the boot process. Usually a memory error on a mac chimes a drum roll, or something like that at the boot rom faze. i did not hear this so I was fairly certain it wasn’t my ram gone rotten. After listing its’ failed attempts to create a swap partition, I was faced with this error.

Fairly straight forward so far. I suspected that it was a hard drive failure. I placed my ear up to where the hard drive would be on a 12-inch powerbook; on the lower left side of the notebook, under the left side of hand-rest, beside the battery, and listened. Fulfilling my fears, I heard a consistent, rhythmic ticking sound emanating deep from within the powerbook’s 1-inch body, which incidentaly reminds me of a techno party i went to in berlin. Anyone who has had any experience with rhythmic ticking hard drive sounds would know that this symptom was, colloquially put, totally fcuked up.

Ok. At this point I started to freak out a little, but only in the inside ;). It was 17:30 so I still had some time to run to conrad, grab the proper screw drivers (a torx T6 and a philips #0 40mm) and a fresh hard drive, stop off at the atelier to grab a couple external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures (6 pin firewire and a 4 pin USB2 one) and rushed back home to be with my ticking sweetheart.

Making a worktable out of a couple a-frame stands and an old door that uli picked up somewhere outside, I set up a quick and dirty workbench in our living room, looked up a howto on the internet, put some rubber gloves on (oh wait, techno party again) and proceeded to jump into the machine.

The procedure was a lengthy and trying process. I had to remove the battery, memory, keyboard, most of the housing and a sh!t load of tiny screws of various lengths and diameter.

After some digging I finally got to the heart of the problem, a 5 year old 30gb Toshiba hard drive. “You little bastard” I called it, as I plucked it from its cozy place. I wonder if heat affected its lifespan. There were quite a few layers of sticker insulating the area of the powerbook that the hard drive was contained in… hummmm… mental note…

Before installing the new hard drive I picked up earlier that day (an 80gb, 8mb 4200RPM fujitsu, for long battery life) I attempted a series of recovery methods to try to salvage any data I could from the hard drive.

I tried to connect the hard drive in question directly to a parallel ATA port on OS X, windows XP and debian GNU|linux machines. I tried again in firewire and usb hard drive enclosures, as target mode for os x, mounting in linux, even installed macdrive on my XP machine but to no avail. Tried a knoppix disk too. I tried to shake it a little. even tried sweet-talking. Nothing. i wasn’t able to initialize the drive what-so-ever. I guess the main problem was simply one of mechanical failure.

After putting the faulty hard drive in the freezer (some long lost, hard drive recovery mojo that smarch bestowed upon me, most likely found on some ancient tomb of a forum, babelfished from some eastern European server), I installed the new hard drive and screwed the poor thing back together with all the care a lover would screw that special someone, although it really doesn’t fit the same way like it did the first time.

Barring some magnetic storage forensics miracle (and boat loads of money) here is a list of the data I lost off the top of my head, forever.

Things lost:

80 or so high resolution photocollages / any photograph I took in the last five months, including new year / 4000+ emails / a whole bunch of new contacts / 2 new proposals for exhibitions in Germany and the Netherlands / all the music I ever made on gameboy and garageband, including all samples, recordings and loops / my CV / some freelance work for a fashion company masterpiece cleaners is working on / a whole buncha other stuff that will be sorely missed.

Things gained:

an ever increasing loss of faith in salvation through science and technology

*This list is more for my personal mourning, but i also hope it scares you into backing up all your stuff right now. That’s right. Stop reading and go back-up. Now.

let this be a lesson to me (again!). back-up, b a c k – u p , !!!BACK-UP!!!! Hope you get the message too. Please back-up regularly (as in, more then every half year) and safely (as in, mirror your hard drive and put it at your mama’s house, or wherever it would be safe from your own house burning). 30 gb of data is really a lot of stuff.

good luck!

zhaus: the living room exhibitions

Here is a follow-up to the first zhaus article I posted a few days prior.

After some days of sleepless nights, i have finally finished poopooshoping the joiners for zhaus: the living room exhibition. Sometimes i feel as if i muscle pixels around for hours, just to get some extra interestingness on flickr and provide some twinkle-twinkle to the normally drab candor that occurs on this weblog, but I digress…

The opening of the show featured quite an intellectually digestible lecture regarding the Turkish Diaspora within Vienna and how various case studies within the community show correlations in identity towards Turkish or western homogonous culture based on the way Turkish Austrians decorate their living spaces and the items of art they choose to display and contextualize themselves with.

The living room is a place where one goes to relax, but it is also identified as a place of social meeting; where one would entertain guests. The art items that are chosen to be displayed in a host’s home provides a situation with which the guest may observe the socio-cultural context or displacement of the host. It’s kinda like putting away that funny looking vase of yours; you know, the one with no flowers in it, when your parents come to visit, because you don’t want your mom and dad associating funny looking vases filled halfway with water and no flowers in them as your own personal flair for interior design.

Along with a lecture for the opening, there was also screenings of videos from participating artists and much of the work was observed in the company of friends and colleagues. At the closing, another zhaus artist spun electro records cross-legged while sitting on a pillow.

Because of the nature of the concept, the gallery space and living space were intermingled, and I often found myself shifting seamlessly from conversations of an artistic nature, to didactic discussions, small talk, etc. never once shedding the feeling of being at a friends place for a party that focused on art in various social, political and cultural contexts, and the consuming of wine. Designers like beer more, apparently. Or was that sekt? I met many intriguing people in those three days.

There were three main rooms that housed all the artworks; the living room, dinning room and toilet, or WC. The bathing room was not available to the public.

And like any home I am comfortable in, I spent most of the time during the opening and closing in the kitchen, close to the booze and cheese supplies… i mean supervise… to supervise the booze and cheese supplies.

Trying very hard to not sound like an alcoholic (but seriously, I’m not) zhaus has been a success of an exhibition in every sense of the word. Not only did the show facilitate a multidisciplinary collection of works and discussions, but also provided a platform for people to freely exchange ideas and email addresses, while fusing the characteristics of both the home and gallery space.

Since zhaus is an international phenomenon, I encourage you to get hold of the zhaus people through their webpage and organize an exhibition of your own when situations allow, in your respective city. I can already think of some super creative peeps i know in toronto that may be interested in the potential to organize using a self-directing, thematic, international exhibition concept. There is already a standardized publication format that you can use and modularly add your zhaus documentation to, contributing to the existing publication. Pretty much roll your own with a tinge of cult identity.

I hope to be able to contribute my skills and eventually make live a weblog and forum for zhaus, depending on the reception and response of the community, and hopefully get one going in berlin when the time is right.

I look forward to participating in the next zhaus:vienna some time this summer, and big ups to Mimi and Karin for organizing such a splendid and creative forum.

I/O MAGAZIN.

remember2forget

Originally uploaded by smallcaps.

on friday i found a treat in my mailbox and it wasn’t the easter bunny (and if you see that dude, tell him i’m not into white chocolate). some time ago i submitted some work to a publication from berlin called I/O MAGAZIN. one of my polaroid self-portraits shares space with great works from photographers, artists, designers and illustrators from around the world. also appearing in the mag are works from good friends, Lam Thuy Vo and Karin Aue so do yourself a favor and
pick one up for they are well worth the 8 euros.

oh, mom and dad.. i got you guys a copy so don’t worry about ordering one. i will send it over asap!

zhaus exhibition in vienna, austria (not australia)

right now i find myself in vienna, austria (not australia) to participate in the first of many zhaus: the living room exhibitions. the concept revolves around the paradigm of the home, and how to define a home. each exhibition features a collection of works dealing with the theme, and will occur in homes around the world, the first one being held in vienna, austria (not australia) if i haven’t made that allusion clear already, if not then my bad.

for this exhibition i have (consciously) chosen to do my first performance in order to deal with the theme. my work will evolve ideas of the home in relation to death, suffering, torture and food preparation. ah, it is a performance so please don’t read to much into what i am saying here. visually it will involve myself reeking pain and suffering to various vegetables using an inquisitions’ arraignment of tools in front of an audience of artists, designers, musicians and social engineers/scientists. I will try to get up a video of the splash damage when I can.

Ok. I know right now the performance is quite a bit vague but i will put down the schnitzel and figure it out before friday. which reminds me of the show; it will open this wednesday and there will be a program of lectures and film screenings. the space will then be open on the following thursday and close on the friday, which is the day of my performance. I know it seems like the show is kinda short, but it’s because it will happen in the flats and homes of actual real-life living people (not the real-life living zombie undead), so if I was one of those persons I would want you to get the hell out of my house asap, especially if you are here to mutilate veggies. where am I going with this… better then tell you with my faulty language, here is the flyer for you to grab and read for yourself. please come by if you are in the neighborhood. smarch i know you are gonna be there, son!

hacking sankt oberholz

hacking sankt oberholz

Originally uploaded by smallcaps.

on monday night masterpiece cleaners went to sankt oberholz to finally install the portal/proxy server we have been working on in the past month. the installation will function as a web portal for users to authenticate with before continuing onto the internet. the server also acts as a dns and finally alleviates the connection problems that some of you may have been experiencing when trying to connect at sankt oberholz. finally, a content management infrastructure is also present so that if the cafe would ever want to move towards an online social networking scheme, it is easily scaleable to meet future demands. still in beta phase, we hope to iron out all the kinks after some daily use. Presently, there is actually two networks up and running for redundancy. all in all the installation went rather smoothly, but please feel free to visit the cafe so that you can stress test it for yourself. oh, and by the way, its secure so don’t even think about it :^P