I’m very pleased to announce the opening tonight of Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and inspiration, part of the Pulse Festival at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA. My silkscreened poster series, There’s No One There, are a featured part of the exhibition.  This is the first time they will be shown in public, and are a kind of preview to the show they’ll have in New York in May.

If you’re in the Savannah area, please go check it out!

Above is a quick comic I did for N+1′s #ows gazette, Occupy! It’s edited by my friend Astra, and she asked me to do a comic, about pretty much anything. Life here in New York as the Occupy madness gets bigger and badder is surreal; suddenly, idealistic rhetoric is plastered on telephones and on the front of tabloids. It’s a heady time, and I tried to reflect that.

You can see a bigger one here.

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/2011/07/theres-no-one-there/ http://joealterio.com/2011/07/theres-no-one-there/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 03:26:28 +0000 Joe http://joealterio.com/?p=999

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’.

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 very excited to announce that I’ve been invited to participate in the “Landscapes of Quarantine” salon, cohosted by BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography. From the description:

“…an eight-week, intensive, independent design studio to be hosted this autumn in New York City; its brief is to create original and thought-provoking design projects that explore the spatial implications of quarantine. The results of the studio will then be the subject of an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in spring 2010.”

Of the many things I love about Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG, his healthy respect for intellectualized science-fiction is at the top of the list. Too often disregarded as nerd-stuff by the low culture and child’s play by the high-brows, (though it’s neither,) science fiction is exactly what we will be examining in this workshop – what the future will bring to us from prevalent current trends, and how we will adapt. I can’t think of anything less akin to child’s play. But okay, maybe it’s a little nerdy.

The list of participants is both amazing and a little intimidating: I hope I can keep up! I look forward to seeing what we all come up with, and thanks tons to Geoff for the invite.

The Thames 1,2,3 Comic, on the inside cover of the new BLDGBLOG book.

The new BLDGBLOG book, with comics by yours truly, is to be released soon. Sweet!

And I’m obviously not alone in my feelings, since Chronicle Books feels the same way. I got a sneak peek the other day, and it’s a completely radtacular, even with present company’s contributions excluded (don’t get me wrong: the radtacular factor is increased to a 9.8 on the Radtacular scale, WITH the comics).

The stories are both Geoff’s, and involve some fanciful musings on architecture one futurist narrative, the other a simpler visual essay on what you could do with a whole lot of money, instead doing boring stuff like buying boats or giving it to Bernie Madoff. They were both a lot of fun to do, and like all my favorite clients, Geoff was very hands-off, and he let me tell it in my own way. Here’s hoping to more collaborations.

You can see both on my Flickr stream here and here.

Enjoy, and buy the book, while you’re at it, ya cheapskates. Whatsamattah, you think the internet owes you free entertainment? Oh, yeah.