In case you didn’t make it to my gallery opening tonight, please take a moment to view the pieces on flickr.

Now that I’ve had a moment or two to calm down after my first ‘solo’ gallery show, I rather more directly now understand how mythical the myth of the solo artist really is.

So… Thanks. Thanks to BNE for inspiring me about how beautiful and wonderous a sticker artist can be. My logo wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for your stickerbombing of San Francisco, Tokyo, and pretty much everywhere I’ve ever been. Thanks to Matt Shlian for your beautiful plotter-cut pieces. I owe you an immense debt, and the creative space your work has opened up to me is vast and beautiful. I hope when you see my work, you don’t find it too derivative. I really tried to leave out the ones that strayed too close to your genius. Thanks to Peter Youngmeister, for telling me that it was okay to try to re-make one of Shilan’s works, that it’s fairly standard for people to learn through mimicking works they find to be wonderful. Thanks to Jonathan Stray, and Rachel Binx, for really lavishing on the praise for my early pieces. It likely meant the difference between me making one or two and calling it a fun experiment versus me taking it this far. Thanks to Ian Baker, who’s been there for every ridiculous consultation that I’ve ever asked. Sometimes, I just need to ask you the question, even if I know the answer. Thanks to Nadya Lev, for being so incredibly supportive, and truly affirming me as an artist among the community of ‘real’ artists that I find so inspiring. It pushes me to make works that I hope can pass as mature and true pieces of art. Thanks to Mike Estee, whose opinions I value so highly, and am so thrilled to be able to occasionally impress. It doesn’t hurt that he brought another laser into my life, either. Thanks to Audrey Penven, for being the best damn photographer that I’ve ever known, who has been so consistently generous and giving and all-around wonderful. Your photos of my pieces are all I’ll have after this exhibit ends, and they are everything I could ever want. Thanks to Aaron Muszalski, for the guidance on how to structure and focus my future pieces. It truly led me down the paths I needed to follow. Thanks to Valerie Leavy for believing in me, for being so accomodating to my ideas, and for giving me the chance to finally display this work publicly. I’m so glad you curated my first show, I couldn’t possibly have worked with anyone else. Thanks to Lee Dotson, you always were available to lend a hand or an eye. I’m glad that I started making pieces that you were into towards the end there. Thanks to Becky, Ashi, Amanda, Trista. Thanks to everyone who sat with me by the laser, hung out with me in the textile lab, tolerated me in the room with the open laptop working on cad. Thanks Doc, and Mella, and Kasey, and Ari, and Laura and everyone cheering me on. I’m going to feel like a jerk for not naming everyone, but it’s essentially everyone I know. I’m tremendously privileged for being able to make this work, and I owe you all a great debt. I hope you enjoyed the work, and that I can start to pay good on my debts with further inspiration and support.

Thanks to the people and systems of Interpretive Arson, Ardent Heavy Industries, and Syzygryd, for finally convincing me that being crap at drawing didn’t mean that I couldn’t be an artist. I’d be nothing at all without you.

I am so humbled by this response. I’m still processing everything I’ve learned from putting together this show, but you, you rollicking joyful crazy love-stuffed world place, you’ve really made me happy. I’ll see you in the future.

So yesterday I visited Treasure Island, San Francisco’s *only* active ghost town, and wandered a bit with Ian through some of it’s more abandoned areas. Happened upon a group of skaters shooting photos, some huge fuel tank things, and well, this.

Awesome.

This is the best photo of me playing DDR/DDI ever. I love it.

I AM ENTIRELY IN THE AIR! Wearing an fplabs shirt! With my hair freshly pink! and gloves strapped to my belt!

The end.

Hm. I’m so sporadic about this posting business. Life’s busy lately, I guess that means it’s spring again.

I love this rope dart so much. It’s been with me for some time now. Maybe it’s time for a new rope? The blue goes so well with the red carabiner though…

In the past, I was part of an oekaki community. That’s where I drew the pixel art bits I posted earlier. Every so often there’d be an image I loved, but it’d only be 300×200 pixels large, and I wanted something more wallpaper sized. Tiling looked terrible, and ruined the impact of the image, while stretching to fit or make larger made it look bloated and wrong. I started isolating my favorite parts, and pulling the ends out to reach the size of the frame I wanted to fill, which looked right to me.

I decided to try this on a photo. It turned out nice. It looks like pushing and pulling at time. I’d like to animate these ripples coming in and out of a photo, but I’ll need to figure out a less tedious way of creating them…

The original photo I used is one of Ed’s from his trip to Washington DC for the inauguration.

originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

A finished thing!

I’ve been working with Morley and Ian on this Burning Man proposal. A lot of working, design, cad, page layout, budget, the works. And the project feels extremely *designed*, like tight and complete and ready to build. So we turned it in! But we didn’t just send them over a pdf and call it a day. This project seeks to represent the history of the earth, all of geologic time! One does not merely submit electronic bits, or even just paper. For a project like this, you submit something solid, something real. Something dense, something… interactive. So we started by making a scale model of our proposed scale model. 52.4 feet long, it provides a short walk through the long and storied tales of our planet. A guidebook accompanies this ‘time rope’, and we’ve dubbed it the ‘time book’. Then we discussed how to best present this object, and decided to have it coincide with the concrete testing we would need to perform to make the columns that comprise the piece. So a concrete cube, with a cylinder cut out of the center was fabricated, three actually, with the best one expertly finished. Topped and bottomed with plates of steel, and the bound proposal document sandwiched between the top plate and a quarter inch of acrylic, we were on the right track. One final touch, a sling of hemp rope and treated wood, and we dropped it off at the Burning Man offices, proud of our handiwork.

View the images of the proposal carrier, and the proposal document itself is up for perusal at timescaleproject.com.

Wish us luck!

droppin some parkour knowledge, originally uploaded by *takeitez*.

So this Saturday, I got together with Vanessa to work on my photography. I haven’t quite gotten to figuring out if any of my shots worked out so well, but I am in love with this portrait that Vanessa took of me! I felt like being particularly colorful, since I was to be hanging around with actual photographers, and imagined that I might be modeling as well as taking photos. Glad I did!

We started out at the mall in downtown San Francisco, which is where this crazy lighted floor lives. My back, which has been pretty sore from a fall during last week’s parkour class, was in good enough shape for me to do some QM (quadrapedal movement) across the floor. It makes for a good prowling body shape, don’t you think?

d - 824

I used to draw pixel by pixel, back in 2002. I occasionally go back to these, and wish that I had the time or drive to do so again. It took me ages, and I just don’t seem to have the sequential hours necessary to do so anymore. I can’t really believe that it’s been six years though! I really liked the end result at the time. 

One more.

drink! - 776

Turns out, not hard at all. And theoretically, this will even post right back into my livejournal! Woo.

So what do I hope to accomplish, now that I’ve got a real blog thing? I’d like to post clips and bits of art that I’m working on, and it seems like a wordpress blog might be the right place for it. I hope to feel more encouraged to get screengrabs of quartz compositions, take strange photos of interesting places, and craft small mixes of my favorite tracks. And I hope to post them all here.

If you look at the blog itself, prepare to be underwhelmed! I have no clue how to make a wordpress theme, or what basic pages to make, or any of that. Figuring it out as I go. Don’t do this very much. So, if you have any tips, please comment!

I’m gonna end this ramble here, with some german guys covering Michael Jackson’s Stranger in Moscow.

[See post to listen to audio]