Structural Patterns

I’m in a group exhibition titled “Ecologías Correlativas” at 319 Scholes curated by chimera+. The exhibition is thematically inspired by Felix Guattari’s “Three Ecologies” and the curators asked me to write a brief statement in response to the essay for the exhibition’s catalog. The following is what I submitted.

I live with a three-year-old boy named Iggy in a household that does not have a television. Iggy has never seen a movie, and yet he recently demanded to be Lightning McQueen for Halloween. Over the past year, he referred to Lightning McQueen and the characters from Disney’s “Cars” merely as “Halloween Cars”. He did not know the names of the individual characters or that they were from a movie. Iggy only knew that he had seen many young children dressed up as “Halloween Cars” last Halloween when he was two. And since then he has observed toys, billboards, posters, books, magazines, lunch boxes, caps, t-shirts, backpacks, folders, bags, stickers, balloons, banners, flags presenting the image of Lightening McQueen or some other character from “Cars”. And then he visited his cousins in Connecticut, two boys, ages three and five that live with a 36-inch television that presents hundreds of cable channels. They regularly log extended periods of time in front of this television. Since that visit, he knows the name Lightning McQueen and would like to know the names of other characters, particularly the tow truck. He has developed a small obsession with “Cars”, a movie he has never seen. From the moment of conception onward, we are all subject to the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism. It swirls all around us, captivates our imaginations, seduces our senses and consumes years of our lives. At times it can be stimulating and good, but for the most part it is noise, bad noise, not the type of noise that takes you on a voyage, rather the type of noise that conjures ambivalence.

Currently, my partner and I are learning about schools for our son. Iggy is two years from kindergarten, however New York City is over saturated with children, so a parent must inform oneself as early as possible. There are not enough schools to properly serve kids and it is getting worse every year. I have recently learned a very important term regarding schooling – “entry point”. There are primary entry points to school – these are the years of a child’s life when there are the most seats available to gain entry into a school. A primary entry point into public schools is Pre-K – age 4. According to one friend younger siblings of kids already attending a given school largely take that entry point. So the next large entry point, because a class or two are added is kindergarten at which point in the public school system Iggy is entitled to a seat in his school district. Of course the problem then becomes overcrowded classrooms and poor learning environments, not to mention the goal to keep moving the kids along through examination and exam training.

Besides the general public school system, there are charter schools and private schools. Both charters and private schools proclaim small classes, individual attention and alternative methods to various degrees. Private schools near my home range from $25k-$30k per year for pre-k through elementary school. Charter schools are publicly financed but independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. I believe that charter schools prosper through the financial and personal intervention of parents. Generally, I do not believe that a low-income parent has the means to financially or personally intervene in a child’s school. I may be mistaken, but I tend to consider charter schools as the privatization of the public school system.

To a large extent I agree with Guattari’s “Three Ecologies”. Remarks against Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) resonate with me. I agree that

(Confronting IWC) will not come about through centralized reform, through laws, decrees and bureaucratic programs, but rather though the promotion of innovatory practices, the expansion of alternative experiences centered around a respect for singularity, and through the continuous production of an autonomizing subjectivity that can articulate itself appropriately in relation to the rest of society.

However, I am left wondering how bourgeois must we become to afford our son a good education. An education that will help provide the weapons to defend himself against the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism through critical thinking and a nuanced perception of our society.

Occupy Wall Street, October 5th 2011, Labor March. Iggy protesting on my shoulders. Photographed by Valerie Tevere

This is pretty cool! Dev Harlan – \”Parmenides I\”, 2011

Dev Harlan – “Parmenides I”, 2011 from Dev Harlan on Vimeo.

We’ve built a country where the presidency must be paid for at excessive amounts, where lobbyists are simply part of the political fabric. Any sense of democracy is long gone. It is so explicit that Chase Bank basically announces that the NYC police will be working for them: Announcement of 4.6 Million Dollar donation to enhance security.

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

Last Saturday, women contained within police orange netting were pepper sprayed. The women were entirely contained, did not present a danger to anyone, were not violent and were pepper sprayed. This can not be ignored – PROTEST TODAY AT 5:30PM ONE POLICE PLAZA

Bill de Blasio believes that the government can decide what is viable free speech and what is not. de Blasio feels that he knows what messages may be censored and which may be allowed to remain in the public space. A couple years ago de Blasio demanded the removal of anti-abortion billboard and stated the following “There should never be a law prohibiting this sort of sign, Mr. de Blasio said, ‘but to have a serious debate, to have people express their outrage, and then to have a private owner of the advertising space decide that it was ultimately not appropriate, that to me is a functioning democracy.'” Read the NYTimes article.

Today the UN Assembly gathers in NYC and I comfortably sit in my office at 68th and Lexington after dodging through stand still traffic while police vehicles weaved through… all for a series of limos with international flags. If you’ve got a limo, get a flag… traffic will part for you. In preparation for the UN members’ visit Two Peoples One Future paid for posters throughout the subway system presenting Israelis and Palestinians beneath these words: “Be on our side — we are on the side of peace and justice.” Local politicians protested and now the posters are down. Just as who paid for the advertisements is public knowledge, the names of the people who demanded that freedom of speech be censored should be public knowledge. Read NYTimes article.

Now off to Wall Street to visit the protestors at Zuccotti Park, I mean Liberty Plaza.

I’m the one artist without a cart in the exhibition Mobility, however the curators elected to include my “Undocumented Drones” as part of the show. The exhibition looks great, upon entering the gallery, I wished that one of my carts was available for the show, unfortunately they are either disassembled or in another part of the world. The exhibition opens Friday, September 9th and runs through October 17th, hopefully my bots will survive. The images below are a preview, the paint bucket in the first photo is not art.

From left to right: Undocumented Drones, Blender by Hidemi Takagi and Pimp My Piragua by Miguel Luciano

From left to right: SOS Mobile Classroom by Tattfoo Tan and Máximo González’s Changarrito

Consume Love by Atom Cianfarani

Close up of an Undocumented Drone – a series of modified hobby robots that have been enhanced with an additional microcontroller, screen and radio module. Each robot presents a rotoscoped animation until it receives a twitter message with the tag “DREAMers”. Upon receiving the tweet, the animation freezes, the motors are activated and the message or tweet is displayed.

The Undocumented Drones represent a near slave class within the United States that exists for cheap labor and does not have a voice – the undocumented laborers contributing to this country and primarily concerned with providing for the children and family. The twitter tag “DREAMers” alludes to the children of undocumented immigrants, brought to this country at a young age who have grown up in the United States, but may not have a right to higher education or employment. The DREAM Act was introduced a decade ago to create a pathway toward citizenship for undocumented youth. The DREAM Act has never been passed, however many of the young adults who would benefit from it have exposed themselves as undocumented and become activists; they are the DREAMers. Each bot juxtaposes the silent day laborer with the activist offspring.

Last month while in Santa Fe, I was struck by a couple paintings in a hotel hallway. They were detailed, clean, whimsical and inventive. I liked the detail in the characters and depiction of enough information to conjure a story in the viewer’s mind. So I photographed them and looked up the artist – Harrison Begay.

Painting by Harrison Begay

Painting by Harrison Begay

Alex Villar climbs up a scaffold and breaks into a business

I just came across video documentation of a new public performance by Alex Villar – “Breaking into Business” that he executed as part of the Open City festival in Lublin, Poland. In “Breaking into Business”, he literally performs the concept of “Open City” by walking through the city pushing a scaffold on casters, setting the scaffold below a business window, climbing up the scaffold and into a window. As I watched the video, I kept wondering if all these places had agreed to his visit or what was the reaction within the location as Alex stepped into the building from a second or third story window. Unfortunately, the videographer only follows Villar on the street and we never see the interaction within the building. As is the nature of Alex Villar’s performative work, the focus is on his action, movement and intervention in and through the urban space.

Rotoscoping is a sequence of traced drawings to create an animated version of live footage.

On July 30th and 31st, Brooke and I will be teaching a rotoscope workshop at the Santa Fe Art Institute.  It’s a 2-day workshop from 10am to 2pm each day and it’s open to 12 participants.  We’ll present as much as possible during the two days and give everyone a clear understanding of what rotoscoping is and how to execute a rotoscope animation.  The workshop will be divided between presentation and production.  Join us, it should be fun! Contact Cathy at 505-424-5050 or info@sfai.org to register

Rotoscoping, one of the oldest techniques for animation, is the tracing of live-action footage, frame by frame, to create an animated version of the movement that may later be modified to create a fantastic short.

Participants will be shown basics of video editing, using Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and introduced to Adobe Flash, the software used for animation and basic drawing. In order to rotoscope, the still images from the videos will be exported from Fincal Cut and brought into Adobe Flash for tracing. Participants can elect to creatively modify or transform the recorded motion rather than strictly follow it.

One of the earliest examples of rotoscoping is Max Fleischer’s, “Out of the Inkwell”.

Rotoscoping is the second exercise that I present to my Intro to 2D Animation students at Hunter College and they have a great time with it. Here are a few examples to extended rotoscoping projects:
“What Are You?” by Daniel Salgado, Untitled by Ryan Cruz, Untitled by Mica Tan.

The Muñoz Waxman Gallery of the Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Arts currently houses a giant child’s dream.  Once you walk past the reception desk, imagine walking into a cave and as you come out the other side, you discover a huge sail boat anchored in the main space.

First view of the THE DUE RETURN upon exiting cavernous entrance portal

My wife took our nearly three year old son to the installation last week and he went nuts.  I didn’t get to see it, so  I decided to take him back today, it was a lot of fun – a rich imaginative space for young children and just cool for everyone else.

The installation was executed by a collaborative group called Meow Wolf and apparently over a 100 artists contributed to the installation.  If you spend enough time in it, it’s easy to see how over a hundred people could have a hand in it, because it’s so detailed and rich.  Although I eventually found at least three ways to get into the second level of the “inter-dimensional ship”, initially it appears that steps carved into stone and dirt are the way in… here’s an image from behind the ship picturing the steps and bridge onto the ship:

Image from behind Inter-Dimensional Ship

Once we were on the deck, my son headed straight to the navigational bridge which is filled with monitors, buttons, switches, leds… The monitor’s present Processing sketches that allow for interaction via a variety of switches.  Two slightly older kids, perhaps 4, 5 or 6 were already at the helm and navigating the ship into a battle.  Iggy jumped right in, though he immediately started calling himself the captain.

Navigational bridge of THE DUE RETURN

Close up of main monitor in the Bridge, a fun Processing sketch.

At the back of the bridge, there are stacked televisions with single channel camera feeds, so that you have a view of other parts of the ship.

Security Monitors on THE DUE RETURN, as in most of the ship, some things function others adorn.

Captain's Quarters

Chamber below the boat's bridge, might be the clinic

Single sleeping chamber, stacked above another sleeping chamber.

Behind the ship as it escapes some floating glow things.

Throughout the ship you can find 2D barcodes that lead you to webpages that tell the story of the ship and it’s crew.  You can learn more about it at THE DUE RETURN’S web site and apparently there’s a link to a related iPhone app… every media available is part of this ship!  It was also a performance space from end of May through June.  But ultimately, it’s a child’s dream come true.