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!

My most recent #OWS poster, completed on Black Friday. I found that somehow appropriate.

Download the full here.

]]> http://joealterio.com/2011/11/second-ows-poster/feed/ 0 http://joealterio.com/2011/11/cloudy-collection-2012-calendar-of-the-impending-apocalypse/ http://joealterio.com/2011/11/cloudy-collection-2012-calendar-of-the-impending-apocalypse/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:02:11 +0000 Joe http://joealterio.com/?p=1064

Are you someone who actually listens to music legally? Good for you, citizen! In that case, this post is for you!

Grooveshark, erstewhile internet radio and online jukebox, is doing something very cool: it’s reaching out to visual artists and asking them to design wallpapers for their online players. I was honored to be one of the artists they asked. Above are the two I made for ‘em, both a bit reappropriated from previous work, but still stand-up in their own right. You can only access them by being a member, but I recommend it; it’s really cool, and has less lawsuits against than other new services. Wheeeee!

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!

There's No One There (2011)

A few years ago, I started having a vivid dream, one of very intense colors and very specific imagery. It’s floated around behind my eyes, but in front of my brain, for a few years, and I’ve been trying to capture it for a while with limited success.

Back in March, my good friend Scott Geiger approached me and asked me to be a part of a literary journal issue he was guest editing, and over a lunch of Korean BBQ sandwiches in Soho, he asked if I would be a part of his issue. I was really thrilled; Scott was one of my fellows in the Quarantine show back in March 2010, hosted by BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography, which was such a great success, and while all parts were great, Scott’s was one of my favorites, both in style and substance. Maybe a little selfishly, as Scott was describing the issue, I realized this was a great venue to try my hand at my next attempt at capturing what was in my brain in that recurring dream.

Some early studies

When I first tried to capture the feelings dominant in the dream, I thought they were paranoia, and so my code-name for the project for a long time was thusly. It felt suffocating, as if the bright colors, cartoonish malevolence, and barren landscapes were designed to get me, as I was chased by the infinite black of those dark windows. But as I ruminated more, I came to realize it wasn’t really paranoia at all; I wasn’t being chased by a thing, per se – I was being chased by a fear. And that fear was of desperate, unending loneliness.  A loneliness that can only be brought on by exploring every inch of your surroundings and finding yourself completely trapped by it, and by the expected nature of it.

As a 33 year old now, a great deal my youth was spent indoors, camped behind a computer screen, playing the early versions of first-person-shooters and walk-through RPGs in the Sierra line. My parents were barely on speaking terms, I was getting shit in school, and the glow of childhood was fading rapidly; I found solace in these games because provided not only a distraction, but a sense of real accomplishment – getting to the next stage, unlocking the door, gaining access to the spacecraft – these felt like real wins. It’s through this lens that a difficult level to beat was an acceptable challenge, but one in which there seemed to be no real solution brought bubbling forth some existential fears that stick with me to this day. To use a clunky metaphor, a man with a gun blocking my exit from a dark alley is a scary but solvable puzzle. However, if the man is absent, but the alley has no exit, and I’m forced to explore endlessly for a way out, one that doesn’t exist  – I find this terrifying beyond belief.

An early, failed attempt

Rather than fading into the bloom of adulthood, I find these fears are now magnified for all of us, on a grand scale. The role of loneliness in a public space grows in proportion to the intended scope of the space to serve the public, namely, a separation created by the manifestation of the rubric of “public space” – large cold monuments, open forums with nowhere to hide, grandiose pretensions that minimize the individual. Public spaces beget private yearnings.

We are also made more alone by our shared digital space. The conundrum of free public wi-fi, for example, serves to create digital walls which we can’t breach with normal every day interactions. Everyone is now in their own digital space of their own making. Our space perception is more and more confused with our digital perception of space; is the train station a level to beat? Is that bus to catch a challenge that will reward a player with points? Don’t I recognize this building from that video game?

You Can't Go Any Further (2011)

Suffice to say, I’m totally thrilled that Scott gave me the opportunity to make this work, and that it will be appearing in the Fall/Winter version of the Ninth Letter. I’ll post more when I know they are on newsstands, but for now, it feels good to get some of this work off my chest. I’m sure if it’s done yet, but at least I can put it aside for now and work on other stuff, guilt free.

The poster series can be seen in full on my Flickr stream here.

You can buy hand silkscreened prints of the posters here.

Thanks for lookin’.

I’m pleased to announce that I have two iPhone wallpapers available on Poolga. Poolga is a site that offers some of the best illustrators work, for free, as downloadable wallpapers. I’m not exactly sure how they make money, but they definitely have some neat stuff. It looks like a lot of European illustrators, which I always love to get more exposure to. Check it out!

Above is a photo of the papercrafted card (click here for larger version) I made for Molly on our anniversary last week. Goopy sentiments aside (that are none of your business, anyway), I’m really pleased how the forced perspective turned out. I was afraid that the multiple layers and manufactured vanishing point would make it look fun-housey, but it really came together. It reminds me of all those amazing dioramas in some of more antique (and ramshackled-ly brilliant) museums around the globe. And of course, there’s some of this stuff, too. Ain’t the world grand?

It started when Alex was hired to do an illustration for Slate, for an article by Farhad Manjoo titled, “How Black People Use Twitter”, that appeared last week in the web magazine of note. I’ll leave the racial and other techno-sociological points for others to debate; Alex’s main goal was to create an image for the article that keyed into it, and for better or ill, he created this peppy little fella, his interpretation of the Twitter bird, but colored brown, and with a large oversized baseball cap, askew, with a hashtag on it.

We can debate honestly as to whether Alex’s drawing was appropriate (I hold that it’s fine), but the story takes a twist. NPR, upholding their long, noble tradition of being about 3 to 7 days behind the rest of the planet when it comes to everything important, then published a piece on their All Tech Considered blog by Sam Sanders; it was accompanied a short audio piece on the phenomenon cited in Manjoo’s piece, and the subsequent fall out.

Notice anything about that piece?

Alex’s name is mentioned nowhere in it.

One could debate the merit of including a discussion of the graphic element of it at all (blogger Alicia Nassardeen photoshopped Alex’s illustrations into a series of different ‘black stereotypes’). The issue brings up so many varied ideas wrapped up around race and technology that had the article ignored that graphic ground completely, it would be a fine piece. This is NPR, after all! Sober discussion! Rational thought! No time for cartoons!

But Sanders dives into that part headfirst, making sure he DOES mention all that stuff, and more: he features the parodies as an illustration for the post, he interviewes Alicia Nassardeen… shoot, he even interviewes a blogger about her opinion about the drawing that Alex did! But… nary a credit in sight.

I find this all incredibly weird, and I’m sure Sanders is a nice enough guy, suffering the time and work constraints that all us in the media world feel. But to consciously leave out such an essential part of the issue that he himself brought up in the first place isn’t some kind of bold journalistic statement. I dare say it’s just bad journalism, and what’s more, just kind of lazy. Would Sanders take a chunk of text, unattributed, and just hope no one noticed? I think not.

At the heart of it, of course, is my personal view that illustrators still don’t get the propers deserved to us (I see a bunch of ink stained fists rising behind me, now), and this is just one in a long line of slights. This is an issue that people who make things easily transferable to the web need to sit down and think about deeply; sometimes, I think we’ve already ceded the ground that we can make money doing it.

I have newspapers – real, live newspapers, that have print runs and stuff, emailing me every week to see if they can use an image they found of mine for free. Every week, no joke. And that’s just the ones who decide to call me. The age of solid rights usage as passed.

What we still have a line in the sand for is credits. Illustrators, it is our last stand. Demand credit, always. Follow up, heckle editors, harangue journalists who take you for granted. Make sure it always links back to you. Sometimes, I fear, it’s all we have left.