Page 3. Click for larger size.

I’m very excited to extend the invite to anyone in the area to the opening night of the group show I’m a part of, Landscapes of Quarantine. From the press release:

NEW YORK CITY – February 17, 2010 – On Tuesday, March 9, 2010, Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine, will open at New York’s landmark Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition consists of new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine. Curated by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh of Future Plural, the exhibition will be on view at Storefront until April 17, 2010. Entrance to the exhibition is free; the launch event on March 9 is open to the public and will showcase a one-night-only, inflatable quarantine prosthesis attached to Storefront’s façade, designed by architects Jeffrey Inaba and Joseph Grima, as well as a range of beers generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery.

This was a bit of an adventure for me, and, I suspect, several other participants, since we had 10 solid weeks of inspection of the subject matter, group idea sharing, peer crit, and a final group review with a stellar cast of all-star critics. As an illustrator by trade, and often a web-enabled artist by choice, I don’t usually have the luxury of ruminating on a project an entire season before putting it together. Often times when, late at night, I’m reading the working practices of famous artists I admire (as I’m wont to do, whiskey in hand), I’m envious of a time when artists were able to chin-scratch for years on one project, painting, or attempt. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but from a pure economics point of view, unless you’re a really famous artist, what someone might get from selling a piece of work hasn’t kept up with cost of living increases, to say the least, so more work is demanded in a shorter amount of time. But maybe it’s also personal. I’m a type-A guy who’s also impatient. Regardless of the reason, the length of time was a breath of fresh air. To be able to share that with a select group of amazing artists who gave some un-sugar-coated honest critique almost felt like I was being greedy.

Detail from Page 1

My particular piece, titled Pages 179-187 is a result I came to after studying both the roots of quarantine in the modern age, as well as the plague epidemics of early times. As we were introduced to the historical material, I became fascinated with the power imbued in the  Powers That Be to make very real decisions of life and death, sometimes with very little real information at hand. The idea of The Word From On High, for the good of all, became, in my mind, inextricably linked with the power structure behind a quarantine, and the nearly-imperialist power that implies, on top of how that word was distributed to the masses. I quickly found a relation between what the elder times placed their faith in (God), and what our more modern forebearers trusted (technology), and came up with a kind of ‘lost fable’, told in a form that was a consciously reminiscent of both 19th century etchings and cartoons, and both Italian and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. My hope is that the result is 8 pages that are nearly ahistorical, so universal are both the themes and the images.

My initial plan was to get these pages binded in a leather tome, but after some teeth gnashing and rending of clothes, I ended up abandoning the plan, due to both a logistical flaw: how do I get every page to be shown without asking the audience to touch the pages?), and a thematic one (isn’t that a little Epcot-y?). My final framing choice I think you’ll find both subtle and really cool and appropriate.

I’ll be posting all the pages, eventually, but if you’re in the area, please do come down and pull me aside to say hello at the opening on March 9th,  at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. It should be a blast, and not only can you see my pieces in person, you can see all the other fantastic stuff on display. See you there!

Download the original press release here.

I find that I’m always in need of greeting cards; I seem to be one of the few people on the planet that still uses the mail for thank yous, hellos, and just just general queries, and some nice compact illustrations that fit on 1/4 of an 8.5 x 11 page are always in need. I’m jealous of some artists who seem to get finished looking sketches done every day – what a treat! I seem to either be running at 5 mph or 90 mph, either loose, loopy sketches that only I can figure out, or really detailed work that I obsess over. So my constant need of card images seems to justify that middle ground that I’m trying to develop; these are a result of that effort. Polished, but not too polished. Thought-out, but not too thought-out. Somewhere in the middle, the truth lies, grasshopper.

A friend sent me over to 99Designs to check it out, and I had to have a glass of whiskey to drown the deepening sense of despair that overtook me. 99Designs is the digital equivalent of standing outside a Home Depot waving at pick up trucks as they pull into the lot, looking for a sheet-rock gig. It is digital day labor.

Let me say this, out of the gate: I don’t bear any ill will to the gentlemen who started the site:. It’s a good idea, on it’s surface, and it’s a market niche that someone was eventually going to fill. It’s just a shame that it was going to happen, regardless.

99Design’s site boasts

Number of Designers: 49,486

Prize Money Awarded: $7,296,679

Total Designs submitted: 2,835,483

Impressive stats on the surface, though some quick and dirty math suggests a bit more sobering numbers. Let’s assume that every one of those submitted designers wins one project, for the sake of argument. That’s about 147 bucks a project. Assuming that a standard, simple design job takes you two days of work (or about 16 billable hours), thats…

About nine bucks an hour.

Ouch.

I understand that the assumptions underlying my argument are so specious that any good lawyer would have taken me out in the back and shot me. Allow me to justify myself a little bit. Obviously, not every designer gets a job. But this doesn’t make the picture rosier for the designers who do. Let’s assume only half the designers get awarded a job, with the same amount of jobs still on the board: that’s still time spent doing work, at 9 dollars an hour, for double the amount of time. A week’s worth of work at 9 dollars an hour? 360 dollars, or $18,700 a year. That’s at the official poverty line for a family of three, by US Government standards. And the US Government poverty guidelines are way out of whack anyway. (That’s ignoring the rate of about $2.50 per design submitted: I don’t even want to calculate the productivity rate of that.)

So what are we to make of this? Call it DIY Culture Wars:  The Level Playing Strikes Back. Before the web, creatives were creatives because of long schooling, draftmanship, internships, connections, and  occasionally, hard work. One of the great things about the digital revolution was that it gave the keys to everyone. Remember all those 1990’s solipistic tropes about “empowerment”?

There was a brief window of time when this “empowerment” was there for the taking by the early adopters, the geeks, and those with initiative and enough talent. The predictive and collaborative nature of the web is sometimes depressingly accurate; there’s a whole host of people that make a living creating obvious statements about where the web is headed (yours truly included.) I’m a firm believer in the collective unconscious. Does anyone really believe that YouTube wouldn’t have sprung up in another form, in another place, if Steve Chen hadn’t done it first? This is tough to explain to those that  have “made it”, but sometimes, “making it” is as much about fortune and luck as it is about talent.

Around 2003, empowerment in the creative class hit it’s stride, the idea that being a freelancer or contractor became not only doable, but desirable, talent be damned. And then another weird turn occured. The empowerment became less about the doing, and more about the accoutrements. When the the history of the great DIY Upsurge is written, stuff will play the villians.

Now, if you take a walk in the kitchenware section of a department store these days: nearly every other item is listed as “professional grade”, as if you need Wolfstoff knives and a copper pans to reheat Mac -n-Cheese. Look at the montrosities that hang around tourists necks these days, or listen to the pale salemen carp on about “megapixels” in the camera department. The 5th grader has a computer that can render digital video at lightning fast speeds, even though he uses it for little more writing papers, porn, and playing video games. This is where, finally, “empowerment”  has come to rest.

And so we turn back 99Designs, in which everyone with with nice computers, and (perhaps illegal) copies of Creative Suite, slings hastily slapped-together designs on a wall, hoping they stick, and trying to do it in as little time as possible, so that the pittance of pays is worth it. What used to be the firm stamping grounds of the manufacturing industry – doing it faster and cheaper, so that the middle class can hold their ground under the onslaught of rising costs and companies that pay less and less for labor – has finally come to the creative class, and it’s a sad day, for me at least.

I’m not the most talented person out there, I’m not a genius, and if I ever tell you I’m a ‘visionary’, please punch me in the face. But I do work hard, constantly, and I am very proud of my work. I also am very proud of how I get compensated. But it’s a sad day when you see the next generation of creatives being forced back into their cage; that which was made to free us has merely exposed us the wider economy, and what used to be our our special little clubby corner is now being outsourced. Far be it for me to sound like anti-populist, but Viva La Protectionism, comrades.

I’m super jazzed to announce that I just got word that I’ll be co-hosting a panel at South by Southwest this year, with Tim Lillis, from Make Magazine. Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web will be a panel discussing the potential of creative people and their audience coming together to create work that is maybe stronger, or at least more interesting, than either creator-directed or audience-directed work alone. I owe everyone a lot of thanks for your votes and support! See you in Austin!

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.

“This discussion will examine the role of crowd-sourced input on the creative process. We will examine art, comics, design, photography and commerce, and the role that the audience plays in directing their creation. We will make a distinction between passive decision-making (i.e. Threadless) and participatory conception (i.e. 700 Hobos Project.) ”

Plus, if we get to go, I’ll try and host a separate Robots and Monsters meetup, which will be rad. It should be fun! Thanks for your vote!

…and we’re back.

Lots of changes to jabber on about, the primary one of which that we’ve relocated to the New York area for Molly to attend law school. So, besides playing the good husband, I now get to reorient myself to entirely new climate, work network, subway system and quality of sandwich meats available in the supermarket. (on this last point: I’ve been away for so long.)

It’s great to be here, and strange, too: I have spent the last 13 years on the West Coast, after growing up in the Boston area, and the shift is one both subtle and profound. I obviously visited quite a bit while away, but one always keeps an area at arm’s length when one is visiting. Too many obligations and distractions to let a city settle into your bones. The first thing that strikes me is just the truly different feeling the streets present to you, a combination of weather, architecture, and presence, if you will; the East coast is more immediate. It demands you pay tribute to it’s grubby walls and soaring pretense. The West Coast keeps everything at an arms length– one can take your SUV from your planned suburb out to the coast, and pretend no one is around. There is no fooling oneself about your fellow travelers here, and, at this point in my life at least, I think that’s probably a good thing.

I shan’t bore anyone with my personal rankings of cities, locales, places, foods: each place is exactly right for what it is. But I feel very, very good to be here right now. It is an awe-inspiring and knee-bending thing to be in the orbit of Manhattan. It is a cliched piece of garbage, but my god, it is true. Take a stroll and peer up above you at the windows that blanket the faces of the neoclassical buildings like a mosquito net to keep out the riffraff; behind each one is a potential lifetime. There is no weed strewn lot someone doesn’t have plans for, no tiny dive bar that isn’t someone’s favorite. But unlike other places, in which those of the hipper persuasion try to find the place unfound, there is a certain welcoming charm to this place like no other, an assurance that everything is already found. Everyone is a New Yorker, immediately. I’m sure this is the good old days for this city, and I would get a different answer if this were the 1970s. But for now, it is the prom queen who everyone wants to be seen with, and my, is she lovely.

Relevant stuff:

+ The new Robots and Monsters site is at near-launch. It’s been a slog, mostly because I’ve asked Glaser, my partner at Squonk, to do it when he doesn’t have time for anything else, and fortunately, that’s not too often. But it will be launched within a month or so, and included there will be the new ordering system, making the ordering process MUCH easier, on both ends. The above graphic is the smaller size of what will be the background. Check out the *HUGE* version to see the details, and that you can use as a background, too.

+ For the past two months, I’ve been working on fun tools for the new Photoshop.com site. Adobe asked me to concept and execute a bunch of fun add-ons to personal photos to jazz them up, and it’s been a blast. Check out the first wave here.

+ I’m one of the featured illustrators on Workbook.com this week, showcasing my new portfolio I’ve got up there: Check it out.

+ This guy is too fucking awesome. Someone needs to kill him. Ben Newman: thy work pierces my heart with the bitter-tipped arrow of jealousy. Nice work.

+ Got invited to a few sweet salons in Manhattan that I’ll be blogging about later. The upshot it that I’ll definitely be back showing some work in a gallery before too long, which makes me exceedingly happy.

+ I can’t believe that actually sell prosciutto and capicola at the deli here, to be sliced. In-bleeping-credible. I’ll trade the avocados for that.

That’s all for now. Mo’ later.

New comic by yours truly, for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. I like probably more than I should. Click here for larger size.

Since being lucky enough to get a lot of work lately, I’ve been finding I actually have more time to spend on personal projects, which is strange. It turns out that a lot more time is spent hustling than I realize, I guess. Up next: long awaited Untitled Gallery Project finally goes into preproduction! W00t!

…according to TeeJunkie.com, anyway. Hooray! Thanks to everyone for voting and throwing me to the top of the list. Yay!

I would just like to thank Jesus, Mohammed, Vishnu, Yaweh, Santa, and the Noodle Monster for their infinite widsom in directing votes my way. The others guys were formidible competition, but at the end of the day, we just wanted it more than the other team. We stuck to the game plan, and our guys gave 110% out there. I’d also like to thank my Momma.

Anyway. You can buy a version of the teeshirt here. Thanks again, everyone!