I’m very pleased to announce two upcoming venues for my poster series There’s No One There.

In the month of April, the five posters have been invited to be a part of Telfair Museums’s annual Pulse Arts + Tecnhology  Festival, in Savannah, GA. It’s the first time my work has been associated with a museum, and it’s very exciting.

Then, in May, the posters come back up to NYC to be featured in a show at Studio-X, co-hosted with Ninth Letter, for the release of their new issue, of which the posters will also be a part of. It should be an amazing show and a great time. Thanks to both Studio X’s Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, and editor Scott Geiger, for all the support.

Stay tuned for additional details for both events. Excitement, she wrote!

I’m really pleased to officially release the final art for the EFF teeshirt I’ve been working on for their DEFCON offering this year. Check out the glow in the dark action here. From their press release:

Say hello to EFF’s second, limited-edition, DEF CON membership t-shirt! Only 340 premium-level donors who attend this year’s DEF CON 19 in Las Vegas will be able to get these new “ENCRYPTION SAVES” shirts, specially designed by Joe Alterio of the creative charity Robots & Monsters.

The folks down at EFF are not only templars for the righteous in my opinion, but they’re really, really nice folks, to boot. I’m so happy I got to do this for them. If you’re at DEFCON, pick up the teeshirt; and if you’re not, watch this space, I’ll be auctioning a few teeshirts from this site, get ‘em while they’re very hot!

UPDATE! Boinged! And Laughing Squid called me a ‘charity demigod’. Oh, you!

Check out this sweet review on Forbes.com of Crazy Boat. The money quote:

“But Crazy Boat: The Curse of the Trash Vortex is different. It’s witty, weird and compelling: It’s like Farmville if you could grow peyote.”

Game, set, and match.

I’m very very proud to finally announce the launch of the secret project I was being coy about for so long: the official launch of the social Facebook game Crazyboat that I was the art and narrative director of.

From the press release:

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It is the near future and the Pacific Trash Vortex has reached critical mass.  A new age of sea entrepreneurship has arisen. Take your rusty rig and explore a changed Pacific Ocean…

ECHO TEAM is proud to present the official launch of the new social game, CRAZYBOAT. CRAZYBOAT aims to use the Facebook platform for its true strengths: the representation and hosting of existing social dynamics and groups in the rich game world. CRAZYBOAT uses Facebook profile data to give players in-game bonuses for their real-world skills and strengths. In addition, in a first for Facebook games, players share their adventures with groups of up to four – and what happens to one affects all four.

ECHO TEAM has also called upon some of the greatest mid-century American action serials to make a game that both harkens back to the adventures of yore and puts a new face on the idea of exploration, with an emphasis on the environmental impact of what reckless exploration means to the planet at large.

ECHO TEAM has drawn on years of game and narrative experience to make a story that feels more socially immersive than most Facebook games. By breaking down the barriers between the real world and users’ social gaming experience, CRAZYBOAT is in line with the ultimate direction of current game design – the integration of the real world and the virtual world. With real people and their data as playable avatars, CRAZYBOAT is a step in that heady new direction. ECHO TEAM views what they present to you today as a proposal of sort. A demo of what is possible.

Download a PDF of what CRAZYBOAT is all about here.

Then, take a quick tour and check the game out.

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On a more personal level, I think I did some great artwork for the promo side of it. Check out the posters and videos we made!

Tell your friends!

I had the great fortune of being interviewed by Benjamen Walker for his WFMU show, “Too Much Information”, about my Cablegate Comix project at HiLoBrow. Benjamen is an incredible interviewer and mind, and I was really honored to be invited on. I’m mostly on point, though I do say “Chechnya” when I mean “Dagestan”. Drat.

My part starts at 13:40, but the whole show is terrific: I share the sir with the likes of Daniel Ellsburg, Evgeny Morozov, and others. Wow!

Listen here!

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Back in November 2009, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to know if I was interested in helping create a few posters for the Institute of Physics in the UK. The problem – one that the US shares – was that the hard sciences in general and physics in particular were seeing declining interest in the population of school children. Part of the problem, it was postulated, was that UK kids were not exposed to the interesting side of what physics is at a young enough age; by the time physics becomes a school course option, most kids have already relegated physics to the ‘boring’ category, and go on to pursue their degree in macrame interpretive dance. But even as an artist, I can say, this is not so! Physics is without a doubt one of the most far-thinking, philosophical fields out there; I’ve been a dilettante about the subject in general for years, and while I can’t claim to speak about it with anything approaching coherence, the fact that I could do anything for The Cause made me kinda pumped, something akin to what the Ghost Army must have felt when landing in France. (Was that too arrogant?)

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Additionally, I had the great fortune to be able to work with Rich Seymour for the initial conception part of the project, which was great fun, and was inspiring to say the least. Meeting someone who has made a career for themselves by brooking no infringement on their creative vision and ideas, and sticking to their guns, even when it meant losing a job – that’s a kind of hard-assery that you can’t buy, you can just learn by spending years figuring out you’re the smartest mother-effer in the room.

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

As per Rich’s idea, we waded into some of the more far-out printing processes, ending up with two photo-luminescent posters, and one printed with thermal inks, that reveal ink underneath when one applies heat, with your hand or a flame-thrower or whatever. The design implications, challenges, and opportunities brought about using their rather esoteric printing techniques were eye-opening for me, and terrific fun.

The posters will be placed in classrooms all across the UK. In a few months, the impressional young eyes of UK youth will all be transfixed by this weirdness, which I feel pretty good about. I’m still in talks with the IOP people, trying to convince them to set up a purchase option for these posters, because I think a lot of nerds might be into these, but we’ll see. Don’t forget to click through the posters to see them full-size, via Flickr options.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that my comic story We Wuz Robbed is in the newest German comic anthology, Mogo Mobo. The latest anthology is titled ‘Nacktscanner’, which, in the words of editor Thomas Gronle-Legron,

loosely translates into “Moga Mobos Body Scanner” (Body Scanners are the “Nude” scanners at airports). The theme of the book is the safety of our personal data, especially, but not only, on the internet.

I met Thomas when we were both invited to speak at the Seoul International Comics and Animation Festival, and he’s an incredible artist, animator, and game designer. You can see some of his rad stuff here, here, and at his website (be sure to check out his microfiche game in the animation section.) He also knows a bunch of amazing European, Japanese, and yes, American artists that make up the Mogo Mobo crew. I’m really proud to be a part of it now.

Moga Mobo’s Nacktscanner will be released at the German Comic Book Fair, the “Comicsalon Erlangen” , 3-6. June 2010. After that, it’s available all over Germany. Go! Pick one up! Now! I’ll wait.

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