I just recently got the original video footage from a friend of mine in Ireland and I finally finished editing it this weekend.

Basically, this is a mash-up of the cartoonish, but graceful, violence of video games with the authentic, but humiliating, violence of real street fights (and the way both types of violence are used to entertain spectators)

Thanks to everyone who helped me with this project, I’m putting a longer version of the video on the project’s page if you wanna take a look!

This is a project I’ve started since I’ve been back in Ireland over the last month or so. It’s a band called, “The Smell,” that only plays trad (traditional Irish music) on battery-operated instruments that I think were all designed to be children’s toys. This is a video of us playing at an open-mic night in a pub in Cork. We’ve been invited back to play again this week and promised some free pints!

Click here to see our myspace music page and hear more of our songs!

This picture was on the front page of The Portsmouth Herald last Monday. Here’s a link to the article: “Dancers try to go all night at 1930s-style marathon” (Photo: Scott Yates)

This is the request line that Jeremy from Buoy Gallery created; it went from the dance floor to the “DJ booth.” (Photo: Peter Maksimow)

This is the dance floor I made with red duct tape. Competitors were not allowed to step outside this line except during designated 5 minute breaks. (Photo: Peter Maksimow)

A guy named Owen made this colored light system which was hooked up to a homemade controller (we also had a strobe light and a smoke machine to create an authentic dance club atmosphere). (Photo: Peter Maksimow)

This is a montage of pictures from throughout the night. (Photos: Scott Yates and Peter Maksimow)

All and all I think it was a pretty successful event. We ended up with a three-way tie at 8 am Sunday morning. After 11 hours of consecutive dancing the three winners walked away with $45 each (that’s $35 pure profit after subtracting their $10 entry fees!).

Thanks to Al Mead and Jeremy LeClair for helping me organize it and for letting me use Buoy Gallery as the venue. Thanks to John Henry Weare for bringing his turntables and for DJing tunes for over 12 hours! Thanks to Owen for setting up the lights and tech support. Thanks to Scott Yates from the Portsmouth Herald and Peter Maksimow for taking pictures. Thanks to Ben Lord for thinking this was a good idea and giving me Al’s phone number. And thanks to everyone who participated.

I hope everyone had a good time!

I’m in a show called Dollar Menu that opened last Friday at the Satellite Gallery in La Grande, Oregon.

It looks like a pretty fun show from looking at the website. I really only applied for it because I had a friend from La Grande in college and it always just seemed like a funny place.

I have three works in the show, the picture at the top of the post is called, doormat.

This is a sculpture of Paris Hilton’s head that I made by stitching together paparazzi photographs of Paris Hilton that I downloaded from the internet and printed on canvas paper. I stuffed the head with plastic grocery bags and mounted it on a plaque like a hunting trophy.

That’s about it.

The Remnants of an Interrupted Scrabble Game Which at 20 Feet Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Harmon and Dali)

The idea for this piece came from looking at a painting by Salvador Dali after I had been playing with a scrabble game and trying to make pictures out of the pieces.

Here is the Dali painting:

Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)
Oil on Canvas, 1976

After this piece was posted on the MAKE: blog I decided to change it to look more like the original image by Leon Harmon on which the composition of Dali’s painting was based. I also changed it so that the final image would fit better with the rules of scrabble.

Here is what Harmon’s original image looks like:

I was careful when I was working on this piece that all the words fit together following the official scrabble rules and consulting the official tournament rules for acceptable 2 and 3-letter words. So, hypothetically, my piece is evidence that a scrabble game could at some point end up looking exactly like a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. And in a 3-D world where Jesus continues to show up on potato chips and the Vatican is looking for proof of alien existence I find the possibilities of the things that might actually happen much more surreal than anything anyone can imagine…

OK, here’s another take-off on the standard Ouija Board.  The Offline Oracle is based on the idea that our subconscious mind records information that our conscious mind does not always have the ability to access.  This is kind of like the way that a computer saves information about webpages that it acesses on the internet.  So the Offline Oracle works by answering questions that you don’t consciously know the answer to but have stored somewhere in your subconscious like, “where did I leave my car keys?” or “how much did I have to drink last night?” this way you can use the Offline Oracle to find out whatever it is you want to know even if you don’t have access to the internet.

One of the theories behind how a Ouija Board actually works is something called Automatic Behavior, which I found defined on Wikipedia as:  from the Greek automatismos or self action, is the spontaneous production of often purposeless verbal or motor behavior without conscious self-control or self-censorship. This condition can be observed in a variety of contexts, including schizophrenia, psychogenic fugue, epilepsy (in complex partial seizures and Jacksonian seizures), narcolepsy or in response to a traumatic event. The individual does not recall the behavior.  

So scientific theory has my back on this one, the Offline Oracle is a bona fide alternative to internet access.  I mean you could even use it to chat with your friends, as long as they are dead and you believe in that kind of mumbo-jumbo.  But the point of this piece is that access to information clearly does not make us smarter, if we are unable to figure out how to apply the information we have to some useful purpose, the internet itself is a perfect illustration of that.  Every piece of useful information on the internet is also fodder for our own illogical arguments and opinions so in some cases it seems to me that a Ouija Board is just as acurate as the internet is at backing-up whatever it is that we want to believe in.

As Halloween rapidly approaches I thought it would be appropriate to post a picture of something I’ve made which I call the Oracle of Truthiness. It’s basically a take-off on the standard Ouija Board, but instead of contacting demon spirits, like in the classic horror film, The Exorcist (see picture below), the Oracle of Truthiness is designed to establish contact with the gut (scroll down to the end of the post for the definition of “truthiness”).

The idea is that instead of trying to cull accurate information from newspapers, the internet and other sources that are potentially teeming with confusing “facts,” the Oracle of Truthiness gives the user a direct line to their own gut so that they can get the skinny on the 411 from a truly reliable source.

The instructions for using the Oracle of Truthiness are roughly the same as using a Ouija Board with a few minor modifications:

Truthiness is a term that television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 when he used it to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. Colbert popularized this definition of the word during the inaugural episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called “The Wørd”. It was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the America Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster.

By using the term as part of his satirical routine, Colbert sought to criticize the use of “truthiness” as an appeal to emotion and tool of rhetoric in contemporary socio-political discourse.He particularly applied it to U.S. President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Colbert later ascribed truthiness to other institutions and organizations, such as Wikipedia.